Shared biophysical mechanisms determine early biofilm architecture development across different bacterial species
Name
journal.pbio.3001846.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.73 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c364fedb2838de6cb2d034861e0e7396
Author(s)
Jeckel, Hannah
Díaz-Pascual, Francisco
Skinner, Dominic J
Song, Boya
Jiménez-Siebert, Eva
Strenger, Kerstin
Jelli, Eric
Vaidya, Sanika
Dunkel, Jörn
Drescher, Knut
Date Issued
October 26, 2022
Journal
PLOS Biology
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Citation
Jeckel H, Díaz-Pascual F, Skinner DJ, Song B, Jiménez-Siebert E, Strenger K, et al. (2022) Shared biophysical mechanisms determine early biofilm architecture development across different bacterial species. PLoS Biol 20(10): e3001846.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Bacterial biofilms are among the most abundant multicellular structures on Earth and play essential roles in a wide range of ecological, medical, and industrial processes. However, general principles that govern the emergence of biofilm architecture across different species remain unknown. Here, we combine experiments, simulations, and statistical analysis to identify shared biophysical mechanisms that determine early biofilm architecture development at the single-cell level, for the species Vibrio cholerae, Escherichia coli, Salmonella enterica, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa grown as microcolonies in flow chambers. Our data-driven analysis reveals that despite the many molecular differences between these species, the biofilm architecture differences can be described by only 2 control parameters: cellular aspect ratio and cell density. Further experiments using single-species mutants for which the cell aspect ratio and the cell density are systematically varied, and mechanistic simulations show that tuning these 2 control parameters reproduces biofilm architectures of different species. Altogether, our results show that biofilm microcolony architecture is determined by mechanical cell–cell interactions, which are conserved across different species.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001846
