ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2011
The population dynamics of bacteria in physically structured habitats and the adaptive virtue of random motility.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
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- The adaptability of grassland soil microbiomes to resource and stress shifts is mainly accomplished by niche conservatism under nitrogen deposition.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Eco-evolutionary dynamics of experimentalMicrobiology (Reading, England) · 2023Article
- Tracking bacteria at high density with FAST, the Feature-Assisted Segmenter/Tracker.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Prokaryotic, Microeukaryotic, and Fungal Composition in a Long-Term Polychlorinated Biphenyl-Contaminated Brownfield.Microbial ecology · 2023Article
- Adaption ofMicroorganisms · 2023Review
- Article
- Leave or Stay: Simulating Motility and Fitness of Microorganisms in Dynamic Aquatic Ecosystems.Biology · 2021Article
- Swimming motility of a gut bacterial symbiont promotes resistance to intestinal expulsion and enhances inflammation.PLoS biology · 2020Article
- Multiple Environmental Factors Influence the Importance of the Phosphodiesterase DipA upon Pseudomonas aeruginosa Swarming.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2018Article
- Assessing Travel Conditions: Environmental and Host Influences On Bacterial Surface Motility.Journal of bacteriology · 2018Article
- Functional Resistance to Recurrent Spatially Heterogeneous Disturbances Is Facilitated by Increased Activity of Surviving Bacteria in a Virtual Ecosystem.Frontiers in microbiology · 2018Article
- Transcriptional Control of the Lateral-Flagellar Genes of Bradyrhizobium diazoefficiens.Journal of bacteriology · 2017Article
- Growth of bacteria in 3-d colonies.PLoS computational biology · 2017Article
- Direct Correlation between Motile Behavior and Protein Abundance in Single Cells.PLoS computational biology · 2016Article
- Natural search algorithms as a bridge between organisms, evolution, and ecology.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- Swimming performance of Bradyrhizobium diazoefficiens is an emergent property of its two flagellar systems.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Diffusion of Bacterial Cells in Porous Media.Biophysical journal · 2016Article
- Bacterial Dispersal Promotes Biodegradation in Heterogeneous Systems Exposed to Osmotic Stress.Frontiers in microbiology · 2016Article
- Evolution of coexistence in a crowded microplate well.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Why is motility so common in bacteria? An obvious answer to this ecological and evolutionary question is that in almost all habitats, bacteria need to go someplace and particularly in the direction of food. Although the machinery required for motility and chemotaxis (acquiring and processing the information needed to direct movement toward nutrients) are functionally coupled in contemporary bacteria, they are coded for by different sets of genes. Moreover, information that resources are more abundant elsewhere in a habitat would be of no value to a bacterium unless it already had the means to get there. Thus, motility must have evolved before chemotaxis, and bacteria with flagella and other machinery for propulsion in random directions must have an advantage over bacteria relegated to moving at the whim of external forces alone. However, what are the selection pressures responsible for the evolution and maintenance of undirected motility in bacteria? Here we use a combination of mathematical modeling and experiments with Escherichia coli to generate and test a parsimonious and ecologically general hypothesis for the existence of undirected motility in bacteria: it enables bacteria to move away from each other and thereby obtain greater individual shares of resources in physically structured environments. The results of our experiments not only support this hypothesis, but are quantitatively and qualitatively consistent with the predictions of our model.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.