ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Cell morphology drives spatial patterning in microbial communities.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 89 papers.
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Who cites it
89 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Emergent collective alignment gives competitive advantage to longer cells during range expansion.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Understanding the development of bacterial colony: Physiology, new technology, and modeling.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2025Review
- Computational model of fractal interface formation in bacterial biofilms.Physical review. E · 2025Article
- Effect of Nitrosative Stress on Biofilm Formation and Upregulation of 2,3-Butanediol Dehydrogenase in Saccharomyces Cerevisiae.Current microbiology · 2025Article
- Long-read methylome analysis of Oleidesulfovibrio alaskensis G20 biofilm under copper stress.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Dissecting the physics of bacterial biofilms with agent-based simulations.Current opinion in solid state & materials science · 2025Article
- Ultrasensitive Characterization of Native Bacterial Biofilms via Dynamic Nuclear Polarization-Enhanced Solid-State NMR.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2025Article
- Disentangling the feedback loops driving spatial patterning in microbial communities.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Review
- Spatial population dynamics of bacterial colonies with social antibiotic resistance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Multiplicity of type 6 secretion system toxins limits the evolution of resistance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Hyphal growth determines spatial organization and coexistence in a pathogenic polymicrobial community in a spatially structured environment.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Uptake and leakage rates differentially shape community arrangement and composition of microbial consortia.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Within-host competition causes pathogen molecular evolution and perpetual microbiota dysbiosis.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Individual-based modeling unravels spatial and social interactions in bacterial communities.The ISME journal · 2025Review
- Deciphering microbial spatial organization: insights from synthetic and engineered communities.ISME communications · 2025Review
- Cell shape affects bacterial colony growth under physical confinement.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Quantifying the fractal complexity of nutrient transport channels inMicrobiology (Reading, England) · 2024Article
29 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
The clearest phenotypic characteristic of microbial cells is their shape, but we do not understand how cell shape affects the dense communities, known as biofilms, where many microbes live. Here, we use individual-based modeling to systematically vary cell shape and study its impact in simulated communities. We compete cells with different cell morphologies under a range of conditions and ask how shape affects the patterning and evolutionary fitness of cells within a community. Our models predict that cell shape will strongly influence the fate of a cell lineage: we describe a mechanism through which coccal (round) cells rise to the upper surface of a community, leading to a strong spatial structuring that can be critical for fitness. We test our predictions experimentally using strains of Escherichia coli that grow at a similar rate but differ in cell shape due to single amino acid changes in the actin homolog MreB. As predicted by our model, cell types strongly sort by shape, with round cells at the top of the colony and rod cells dominating the basal surface and edges. Our work suggests that cell morphology has a strong impact within microbial communities and may offer new ways to engineer the structure of synthetic communities.
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