482: Colony Concentric Clock Construction

09/04/23 • 14 min

This episode: Single-celled bacteria can act independently to create patterns and structure in their biofilm communities!

Download Episode (9.6 MB, 14.0 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Dictyostelium discoideum Skipper virus

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Takeaways Large multicellular organisms like us have interesting mechanisms for using one set of genetic instructions present in all cells to form a large, complex community of many different types of cells with different structures and functions, all working together. Single-celled microbes do not have the same requirements for genetic or structural complexity, but they do often display interesting communal patterns and behaviors. In this study, bacteria growing in colonies on agar displayed a particular mechanism of pattern formation previously seen only in eukaryotes, called segmentation clock or clock and wavefront process. In this process, the cells in the colony are all acting individually without communication with each other, but nevertheless form a repeating ring structure in the colony as it grows, possibly allowing some measure of differentiation of cells that could help the community survive various challenges. Journal Paper: Chou K-T, Lee DD, Chiou J, Galera-Laporta L, Ly S, Garcia-Ojalvo J, Süel GM. 2022. A segmentation clock patterns cellular differentiation in a bacterial biofilm. Cell 185:145-157.e13.

Email questions or comments to bacteriofiles at gmail dot com. Thanks for listening!

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This episode: Single-celled bacteria can act independently to create patterns and structure in their biofilm communities!

Download Episode (9.6 MB, 14.0 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Dictyostelium discoideum Skipper virus

News item

Email questions or comments to bacteriofiles at gmail dot com. Thanks for listening!

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Android, or RSS. Support the show at Patreon, or check out the show at Twitter or Facebook.

Previous Episode

481: Hijacker-Host Sequence Swap

This episode: Gene transfers between viruses and eukaryotes have happened many times throughout evolutionary history!

Download Episode (7.5 MB, 10.9 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Mycoplasma subdolum

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Takeaways As we’ve all seen recently, viruses can cause a lot of trouble. Their biology requires them to be parasites inside the cells of their hosts, and they can cause devastating disease, so it’s hard to think of them as having played important roles in the development of life on Earth, including our own evolution. However, this study found thousands of apparent historical transfers of genes from virus to host or from host to virus in the cells of all kinds of different eukaryotes. Some of these genes play important roles in the cell, helping to make them what they are. Journal Paper: Irwin NAT, Pittis AA, Richards TA, Keeling PJ. 2022. Systematic evaluation of horizontal gene transfer between eukaryotes and viruses. Nat Microbiol 7:327–336.

Next Episode

483: Recycling Resources Raises Robustness

This episode: Adding tags to proteins to increase their degradation can help engineered bacteria grow and survive better under various conditions!

Download Episode (7.3 MB, 10.4 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Lactococcus virus sk1

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Takeaways Engineering bacteria with new genetic pathways allows us to use them in many new and promising applications. Some of these are industrial fermentations, growing large quantities of bacteria to use as catalysts for production of chemicals of interest, such as biofuels. But in other cases, engineered microbes can be most useful in less controlled environments, such as the soil. In these situations, the engineering can throw off their natural metabolic balance, making them less tolerant of the stresses of such environments. In this study, a solution to this issue was tested using protein tags that signal the bacterial enzymes to degrade the engineered proteins. A variety of tags allowed for a variety of rates of degradation, allowing engineers to tune in the ideal rate. Bacteria with these engineered tags grew better in nutrient limited conditions than those without. Journal Paper: Szydlo K, Ignatova Z, Gorochowski TE. 2022. Improving the Robustness of Engineered Bacteria to Nutrient Stress Using Programmed Proteolysis. ACS Synth Biol 11:1049–1059.