Bacterial maze runners reveal hidden diversity in chemotactic performance
Authors:M. Mehdi Salek1,#, Francesco Carrara1,#, Vicente Fernandez1 and Roman Stocker1
doi: 10.15698/mic2019.08.688
Volume 6, pp. 370 to 372, published 01/07/2019.
1 Institute for Environmental Engineering, Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
Keywords:
bacterial chemotaxis, microfluidics, T-maze geometry, phenotypic heterogeneity, Escherichia coli, chemotactic sensitivity.
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Please cite this article as:
M. Mehdi Salek, Francesco Carrara, Vicente Fernandez and Roman Stocker (2019). Bacterial maze runners reveal hidden diversity in chemotactic performance. Microbial Cell 6(8): 370-372. doi: 10.15698/mic2019.08.688
© 2019 Salek et al. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduc-tion in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.
Abstract:
Chemotaxis allows microorganisms to exploit gradients in chemical stimuli to find nutrient resources and hosts or escape noxious substances. Thus, the life of individual microbes in their natural environments is a continual sequence of decisions based on the perceived chemical gradients. However, it has remained unclear to what extent the chemotaxis properties vary among cells of one species, and whether there is a spectrum of different ‘decision makers’ within populations of bacteria. In our recent study (Salek, Carrara et al., Nature Communications 10 (1), 1877), we combine microfluidic experiments with mathematical modeling to demonstrate that even in clonal populations, bacteria are individuals with different abilities to climb chemical gradients.