ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Motile curved bacteria are Pareto-optimal.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Structure, Diversity, and Metabolic Potential of Bacterioplankton in an Urban River at a Long Low-Level Water Period.Water environment research : a research publication of the Water Environment Federation · 2026Article
- Effects of curvature on growing films of microorganisms.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Functional morphology of gliding motility in benthic diatoms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Optimal Cell Length for Exploration and Exploitation in Chemotactic Planktonic Bacteria.Environmental microbiology · 2024Article
- Tetrapod sperm length evolution in relation to body mass is shaped by multiple trade-offs.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Designing highly efficient interlocking interactions in anisotropic active particles.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Synchronized Swarmers and Sticky Stalks: Caulobacter crescentus as a Model for Bacterial Cell Biology.Journal of bacteriology · 2023Review
- Optimal transcriptional regulation of dynamic bacterial responses to sudden drug exposures.Biophysical journal · 2022Article
- Bacterial motility: machinery and mechanisms.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2022Review
- Exploring the sensitivity in jellyfish locomotion under variations in scale, frequency, and duty cycle.Journal of mathematical biology · 2021Article
- CrvA and CrvB form a curvature-inducing module sufficient to induce cell-shape complexity in Gram-negative bacteria.Nature microbiology · 2021Article
- The art of coarse Stokes: Richardson extrapolation improves the accuracy and efficiency of the method of regularized stokeslets.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Microrheology reveals microscale viscosity gradients in planktonic systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Straightening up for life in a biofilm.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Article
- Hydrodynamic Simulations of the Performance Landscape for Suction-Feeding Fishes Reveal Multiple Peaks for Different Prey Types.Integrative and comparative biology · 2020Article
- The Inorganic Nutrient Regime and themSphere · 2020Article
- Passively parallel regularized stokeslets.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2020Article
- Poly-aneuploid cancer cells promote evolvability, generating lethal cancer.Evolutionary applications · 2020Article
- How Do Cells Adapt? Stories Told in Landscapes.Annual review of chemical and biomolecular engineering · 2020Review
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Curved rods are a ubiquitous bacterial phenotype, but the fundamental question of why they are shaped this way remains unanswered. Through in silico experiments, we assessed freely swimming straight- and curved-rod bacteria of a wide diversity of equal-volume shapes parameterized by elongation and curvature, and predicted their performances in tasks likely to strongly influence overall fitness. Performance trade-offs between these tasks lead to a variety of shapes that are Pareto-optimal, including coccoids, all straight rods, and a range of curvatures. Comparison with an extensive morphological survey of motile curved-rod bacteria indicates that the vast majority of species fall within the Pareto-optimal region of morphospace. This result is consistent with evolutionary trade-offs between just three tasks: efficient swimming, chemotaxis, and low cell construction cost. We thus reveal the underlying selective pressures driving morphological diversity in a widespread component of microbial ecosystems.
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