ArticlePLoS genetics2017
Cell-to-cell variation and specialization in sugar metabolism in clonal bacterial populations.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- Decoding the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of bacterial virulence gene expression using single-cell approaches.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Computational model of fractal interface formation in bacterial biofilms.Physical review. E · 2025Article
- Doblin: inferring dominant clonal lineages from high-resolution DNA barcoding time series.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- The intersection of hostMicrobiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2024Review
- Extensive cellular multi-tasking withinmSystems · 2023Article
- Effective bet-hedging through growth rate dependent stability.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Public good-driven release of heterogeneous resources leads to genotypic diversification of an isogenic yeast population.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Single-cell stable isotope probing in microbial ecology.ISME communications · 2022Review
- Nutrient and salt depletion synergistically boosts glucose metabolism in individual Escherichia coli cells.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Multiple timescales in bacterial growth homeostasis.iScience · 2022Article
- NanoSIP: NanoSIMS Applications for Microbial Biology.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2022Article
- Microfluidic Single-Cell Analytics.Advances in biochemical engineering/biotechnology · 2022Article
- Single-cell Raman spectroscopy identifiesFrontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Exploiting Information and Control Theory for Directing Gene Expression in Cell Populations.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Review
- Noise suppression in stochastic genetic circuits using PID controllers.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Microbial metabolic noise.WIREs mechanisms of disease · 2021Review
- Article
- Functional roles of microbial cell-to-cell heterogeneity and emerging technologies for analysis and control.Current opinion in microbiology · 2020Review
- Metabolic Heterogeneity and Cross-Feeding in Bacterial Multicellular Systems.Trends in microbiology · 2020Review
- Bacterial metabolic heterogeneity: origins and applications in engineering and infectious disease.Current opinion in biotechnology · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While we have good understanding of bacterial metabolism at the population level, we know little about the metabolic behavior of individual cells: do single cells in clonal populations sometimes specialize on different metabolic pathways? Such metabolic specialization could be driven by stochastic gene expression and could provide individual cells with growth benefits of specialization. We measured the degree of phenotypic specialization in two parallel metabolic pathways, the assimilation of glucose and arabinose. We grew Escherichia coli in chemostats, and used isotope-labeled sugars in combination with nanometer-scale secondary ion mass spectrometry and mathematical modeling to quantify sugar assimilation at the single-cell level. We found large variation in metabolic activities between single cells, both in absolute assimilation and in the degree to which individual cells specialize in the assimilation of different sugars. Analysis of transcriptional reporters indicated that this variation was at least partially based on cell-to-cell variation in gene expression. Metabolic differences between cells in clonal populations could potentially reduce metabolic incompatibilities between different pathways, and increase the rate at which parallel reactions can be performed.
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