Gut bacterial aggregates as living gels.

ABSTRACT: The spatial organization of gut microbiota influences both microbial abundances and host-microbe interactions, but the underlying rules relating bacterial dynamics to large-scale structure remain unclear. To this end, we studied experimentally and theoretically the formation of three-dimensional bacterial clusters, a key parameter controlling susceptibility to intestinal transport and access to the epithelium. Inspired by models of structure formation in soft materials, we sought to understand how the distribution of gut bacterial cluster sizes emerges from bacterial-scale kinetics. Analyzing imaging-derived data on cluster sizes for eight different bacterial strains in the larval zebrafish gut, we find a common family of size distributions that decay approximately as power laws with expon

SUBMITTER: Schlomann BH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8514234 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature