ArticleThe ISME journal2018
The spatial and metabolic basis of colony size variation.
Article in The ISME journal, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 77 citations in OpenAlex.
- Geometric ordering in bacterial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Minding the gap: collective determinants of multiscale structure across interacting bacterial colonies.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Microbial interactions in facilitating antibiotic activity and resistance evolution.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Carbon substrate type shapes spatial self-organization in a multi-species biofilm community.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Bacterial growth in poly(vinyl alcohol) hydrogel with nutrients and indicator.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Slower-growing species promote interspecific cooperation and coexistence under acid stress through cross-feeding.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Biophysical metabolic modeling of complex bacterial colony morphology.Cell systems · 2025Article
- Novel two-stage expansion of Streptococcus mutans biofilm supports EPS-targeted prevention strategies for early childhood caries.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Article
- Disentangling the feedback loops driving spatial patterning in microbial communities.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Review
- A screening setup to streamlineMaterials today. Bio · 2025Article
- Selection for toxin production in spatially structured environments increases with growth rate.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Evaluating agar-plating and dilution-to-extinction isolation methods for generating oak-associated microbial culture collections.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Maximum likelihood estimators for colony-forming units.Microbiology spectrum · 2024Review
- A 'rich-get-richer' mechanism drives patchy dynamics and resistance evolution in antibiotic-treated bacteria.Molecular systems biology · 2024Article
- Quantifying massively parallel microbial growth with spatially mediated interactions.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Emergent antibiotic persistence in a spatially structured synthetic microbial mutualism.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Article
- High-throughput microbial culturomics using automation and machine learning.Nature biotechnology · 2023Article
- The role of recognition error in the stability of green-beard genes.Evolution letters · 2023Article
- Use of the speckle imaging sub-pixel correlation analysis in revealing a mechanism of microbial colony growth.Scientific reports · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Spatial structure impacts microbial growth and interactions, with ecological and evolutionary consequences. It is therefore important to quantitatively understand how spatial proximity affects interactions in different environments. We tested how proximity influences colony size when either Escherichia coli or Salmonella enterica are grown on various carbon sources. The importance of colony location changed with species and carbon source. Spatially explicit, genome-scale metabolic modeling recapitulated observed colony size variation. Competitors that determine territory size, according to Voronoi diagrams, were the most important drivers of variation in colony size. However, the relative importance of different competitors changed through time. Further, the effect of location increased when colonies took up resources quickly relative to the diffusion of limiting resources. These analyses made it apparent that the importance of location was smaller than expected for experiments with S. enterica growing on glucose. The accumulation of toxic byproducts appeared to limit the growth of large colonies and reduced variation in colony size. Our work provides an experimentally and theoretically grounded understanding of how location interacts with metabolism and diffusion to influence microbial interactions.
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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.