ArticleThe ISME journal2017
Chirality in microbial biofilms is mediated by close interactions between the cell surface and the substratum.
Article in The ISME journal, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Wrinkle-like structures emerge from matrix complementarity and mechanical discontinuity in heterogenous biofilms.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2026Article
- Chiral gliding: Right-handed navigation of filamentous cyanobacteria.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Disentangling the feedback loops driving spatial patterning in microbial communities.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Review
- Growing bacterial colonies harness emergent genealogical demixing to regulate organizational entropy.Biophysical reports · 2024Article
- Genetic mixing and demixing on expanding spherical frontiers.ISME communications · 2024Article
- Motility mediates satellite formation in confined biofilms.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Chiral and nematic phases of flexible active filaments.Nature physics · 2023Article
- Mechanisms driving spatial distribution of residents in colony biofilms: an interdisciplinary perspective.Open biology · 2022Review
- Article
- Leveraging Experimental Strategies to Capture Different Dimensions of Microbial Interactions.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Review
- Minimal physicalism as a scale-free substrate for cognition and consciousness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2021Article
- Intra-colony channels in E. coli function as a nutrient uptake system.The ISME journal · 2020Article
- Bacterial surface motility is modulated by colony-scale flow and granular jamming.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Chiral twisting in a bacterial cytoskeletal polymer affects filament size and orientation.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Does regeneration recapitulate phylogeny? Planaria as a model of body-axis specification in ancestral eumetazoa.Communicative & integrative biology · 2020Article
- Cell organelle-based analysis of cell chirality.Communicative & integrative biology · 2019Article
- Chirality provides a direct fitness advantage and facilitates intermixing in cellular aggregates.PLoS computational biology · 2018Article
- Genetic drift and selection in many-allele range expansions.PLoS computational biology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
From microbial biofilms to human migrations, spatial competition is central to the evolutionary history of many species. The boundary between expanding populations is the focal point of competition for space and resources and is of particular interest in ecology. For all Escherichia coli strains studied here, these boundaries move in a counterclockwise direction even when the competing strains have the same fitness. We find that chiral growth of bacterial colonies is strongly suppressed by the expression of extracellular features such as adhesive structures and pili. Experiments with other microbial species show that chiral growth is found in other bacteria and exclude cell wall biosynthesis and anisotropic shape as the primary causes of chirality. Instead, intimate contact with the substratum is necessary for chirality. Our results demonstrate that through a handful of surface molecules cells can fundamentally reorganize their migration patterns, which might affect intra- and interspecific competitions through colony morphology or other mechanisms.
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