Shared biophysical mechanisms determine early biofilm architecture development across different bacterial species

Hannah Jeckel, Francisco Díaz-Pascual, Dominic J Skinner, Boya Song, Eva Jiménez-Siebert, Kerstin Strenger, Eric Jelli, Sanika Vaidya, Jörn Dunkel and Knut Drescher

PLOS Biology, 2022, vol. 20, issue 10, 1-14

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.Bacterial biofilms are highly abundant forms of microbial life. Using single-cell-resolution structural images of biofilms comprising several different bacterial species, this study employs a data-driven approach to identify fundamental biophysical principles of biofilm development, conserved across species.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001846 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/file ... 01846&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pbio00:3001846

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001846

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS Biology from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosbiology ().