Year-end Sale % OFF 
Abstract
Dense bacterial communities, known as biofilms, can have functional spatial organization driven by self-organizing chemical and physical interactions between cells, and their environment. In this work, we investigated intercellular adhesion, a pervasive property of bacteria in biofilms, to identify effects on the internal structure of bacterial colonies. We expressed the self-recognizing ag43 adhesin protein in Escherichia coli to generate adhesion between cells, which caused aggregation in liquid culture and altered microcolony morphology on solid media. We combined the adhesive phenotype with an artificial colony patterning system based on plasmid segregation, which marked clonal lineage domains in colonies grown from single cells. Engineered E. coli were grown to colonies containing domains with varying adhesive properties, and investigated with microscopy, image processing and computational modelling techniques. We found that intercellular adhesion elongated the fractal-like boundary between cell lineages only when both domains within the colony were adhesive, by increasing the rotational motion during colony growth. Our work demonstrates that adhesive intercellular interactions can have significant effects on the spatial organization of bacterial populations, which can be exploited for biofilm engineering. Furthermore, our approach provides a robust platform to study the influence of intercellular interactions on spatial structure in bacterial populations.
Highlights
Surface growing microbial biofilms are highly prevalent in nature, and their study is relevant to both medical and industrial biotechnology
Intercellular adhesion was introduced with the ag43 adhesin, cloned by PCR from the genome of E. coli TOP10 (Invitrogen)
The pLlac-O1 promoter is bound and repressed by the LacI repressor protein, and this repression is lifted by the allolactose molecular mimic Isopropyl b-D-1-thiogalactopyranoside (IPTG), inducing transcription from the promoter
Summary
Surface growing microbial biofilms are highly prevalent in nature, and their study is relevant to both medical and industrial biotechnology. Biofilms are often made up of a complex community of organisms [1,2,3], whose interactions often lead to advantageous emergent behaviour [4,5,6,7,8,9,10] Many such advantages are generated by an emergent spatial structure, which can act to improve a multitude of processes such as resource uptake [11,12], metabolic cooperation [13] and waste evacuation [14]. Given the recent interest in engineering synthetic microbial communities [20,21,22], and the importance of spatial structure in natural biofilms, it is important that we understand such self-organizing processes to engineer more sophisticated bacterial systems.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
