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How the motility pattern of bacteria affects their dispersal and chemotaxis.

ABSTRACT: Most bacteria at certain stages of their life cycle are able to move actively; they can swim in a liquid or crawl on various surfaces. A typical path of the moving cell often resembles the trajectory of a random walk. However, bacteria are capable of modifying their apparently random motion in response to changing environmental conditions. As a result, bacteria can migrate towards the source of nutrients or away from harmful chemicals. Surprisingly, many bacterial species that were studied have several distinct motility patterns, which can be theoretically modeled by a unifying random walk approach. We use this approach to quantify the process of cell dispersal in a homogeneous environment and show how the bacterial drift velocity towards the source of attracting chemicals is affected by the motility pattern of the bacteria. Our results open up the possibility of accessing additional information about the intrinsic response of the cells using macroscopic observations of bacteria moving in inhomogeneous environments.

SUBMITTER: Taktikos J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3876982 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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How the motility pattern of bacteria affects their dispersal and chemotaxis.

Taktikos Johannes J Stark Holger H Zaburdaev Vasily V

PloS one 20131231 12

Most bacteria at certain stages of their life cycle are able to move actively; they can swim in a liquid or crawl on various surfaces. A typical path of the moving cell often resembles the trajectory of a random walk. However, bacteria are capable of modifying their apparently random motion in response to changing environmental conditions. As a result, bacteria can migrate towards the source of nutrients or away from harmful chemicals. Surprisingly, many bacterial species that were studied have ...[more]

PMID: 24391710

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Project description:Most of Earth's biomass is composed of polysaccharides. During biomass decomposition, polysaccharides are degraded by heterotrophic bacteria as a nutrient and energy source and are thereby partly remineralized into CO2. As polysaccharides are heterogeneously distributed in nature, following the colonization and degradation of a polysaccharide hotspot the cells need to reach new polysaccharide hotspots. Even though many studies indicate that these degradation-dispersal cycles contribute to the carbon flow in marine systems, we know little about how cells alternate between polysaccharide degradation and motility, and which environmental factors trigger this behavioral switch. Here, we studied the growth of the marine bacterium Vibrio cyclitrophicus ZF270 on the abundant marine polysaccharide alginate, both in its soluble polymeric form as well as on its breakdown products. We used microfluidics coupled to time-lapse microscopy to analyze motility and growth of individual cells, and RNA sequencing to study associated changes in gene expression. We found that single cells grow at reduced rate on alginate until they form large groups that cooperatively break down the polymer. Exposing cell groups to digested alginate accelerates cell growth and changes the expression of genes involved in alginate degradation and catabolism, central metabolism, ribosomal biosynthesis, and transport. However, exposure to digested alginate also triggers cells to become motile and disperse from cell groups, proportionally increasing with the group size before the nutrient switch, and this is accompanied by high expression of genes involved in flagellar assembly, chemotaxis, and quorum sensing. The motile cells chemotax toward polymeric but not digested alginate, likely enabling them to find new polysaccharide hotspots. Overall, our findings reveal cellular mechanisms that might also underlie bacterial degradation-dispersal cycles, which influence the remineralization of biomass in marine environments.

Dataset Information

How the motility pattern of bacteria affects their dispersal and chemotaxis.

Publications

How the motility pattern of bacteria affects their dispersal and chemotaxis.

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