ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Formation and maintenance of nitrogen-fixing cell patterns in filamentous cyanobacteria.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
- Filamentous Algae for Wastewater Circularity: A Review of Wastewater Treatment, Resource Recovery, and Biorefinery Opportunities.Microorganisms · 2026Review
- Cell division timing shapes the morphology and size of nascent multicellular organisms.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Co-option of an ancestral peptidase controls developmental patterning in multicellular cyanobacteria.iScience · 2026Article
- Hacking heterocysts: advances in the genetic regulation of heterocyst differentiation.Archives of microbiology · 2025Review
- A mathematical framework for understanding the spontaneous emergence of complexity applicable to growing multicellular systems.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Mathematical Modeling of Photo- and Thermomorphogenesis in Plants.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2024Article
- PatU3 plays a central role in coordinating cell division and differentiation in pattern formation of filamentous cyanobacterium Nostoc sp. PCC 7120.Science China. Life sciences · 2023Article
- Photobiohydrogen Production and Strategies for HAdvances in biochemical engineering/biotechnology · 2023Article
- Terminal heterocyst differentiation in the Anabaena patA mutant as a result of post-transcriptional modifications and molecular leakage.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Time after time: detecting annual patterns in stream bacterial biofilm communities.Environmental microbiology · 2022Article
- The Beneficial Effects of Cyanobacterial Co-Culture on Plant Growth.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- The evolution of mechanisms to produce phenotypic heterogeneity in microorganisms.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Mathematical models of nitrogen-fixing cell patterns in filamentous cyanobacteria.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2022Review
- Cell Cycle, Filament Growth and Synchronized Cell Division in Multicellular Cable Bacteria.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
- HetL, HetR and PatS form a reaction-diffusion system to control pattern formation in the cyanobacteriumeLife · 2020Article
- The interplay of spatial organization and biochemistry in building blocks of cellular signalling pathways.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Two MYB Proteins in a Self-Organizing Activator-Inhibitor System Produce Spotted Pigmentation Patterns.Current biology : CB · 2020Article
- Carbon Transfer from the Host Diatom Enables Fast Growth and High Rate of NPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Expression from DIF1-motif promoters of hetR and patS is dependent on HetZ and modulated by PatU3 during heterocyst differentiation.PloS one · 2020Article
- Quantitative models of nitrogen-fixing organisms.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cyanobacteria forming one-dimensional filaments are paradigmatic model organisms of the transition between unicellular and multicellular living forms. Under nitrogen-limiting conditions, in filaments of the genus Anabaena, some cells differentiate into heterocysts, which lose the possibility to divide but are able to fix environmental nitrogen for the colony. These heterocysts form a quasiregular pattern in the filament, representing a prototype of patterning and morphogenesis in prokaryotes. Recent years have seen advances in the identification of the molecular mechanism regulating this pattern. We use these data to build a theory on heterocyst pattern formation, for which both genetic regulation and the effects of cell division and filament growth are key components. The theory is based on the interplay of three generic mechanisms: local autoactivation, early long-range inhibition, and late long-range inhibition. These mechanisms can be identified with the dynamics of hetR, patS, and hetN expression. Our theory reproduces quantitatively the experimental dynamics of pattern formation and maintenance for wild type and mutants. We find that hetN alone is not enough to play the role as the late inhibitory mechanism: a second mechanism, hypothetically the products of nitrogen fixation supplied by heterocysts, must also play a role in late long-range inhibition. The preponderance of even intervals between heterocysts arises naturally as a result of the interplay between the timescales of genetic regulation and cell division. We also find that a purely stochastic initiation of the pattern, without a two-stage process, is enough to reproduce experimental observations.
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