ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2019
Metabolic activity affects the response of single cells to a nutrient switch in structured populations.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Metabolic feedbacks drive population dynamics and can lead to oscillations among leaf bacteria.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Characterizing Spatiotemporal Expansion of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Communities in Polymer and Mucin Gel Environments.Biotechnology and bioengineering · 2026Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Clear niche partitioning of nitrite-oxidizing bacteria from the bottom and the slope of Mariana Trench.Microbiome · 2025Article
- Community-specific cell death sustains bacterial expansion under phosphorus starvation.Nature chemical biology · 2025Article
- Spatiotemporal development of expanding bacterial colonies driven by emergent mechanical constraints and nutrient gradients.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Disentangling the feedback loops driving spatial patterning in microbial communities.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Review
- Persistent glucose consumption under antibiotic treatment protects bacterial community.Nature chemical biology · 2025Article
- Spatially structured exchange of metabolites enhances bacterial survival and resilience in biofilms.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Microfluidic approaches in microbial ecology.Lab on a chip · 2024Review
- Minorities drive growth resumption in cross-feeding microbial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Evaporation-induced hydrodynamics control plasmid transfer during surface-associated microbial growth.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2023Article
- The contrasting roles of nitric oxide drive microbial community organization as a function of oxygen presence.Current biology : CB · 2022Article
- Controlling microbial co-culture based on substrate pulsing can lead to stability through differential fitness advantages.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- A Microfluidic Approach for Quantitative Study of Spatial Heterogeneity in Bacterial Biofilms.Small science · 2022Article
- Dynamic proteome allocation regulates the profile of interaction of auxotrophic bacterial consortia.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Toward modeling metabolic state from single-cell transcriptomics.Molecular metabolism · 2022Review
- Global dynamics of microbial communities emerge from local interaction rules.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Bacterial age distribution in soil - Generational gaps in adjacent hot and cold spots.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Application of microfluidic systems in modelling impacts of environmental structure on stress-sensing by individual microbial cells.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Microbes live in ever-changing environments where they need to adapt their metabolism to different nutrient conditions. Many studies have characterized the response of genetically identical cells to nutrient switches in homogeneous cultures; however, in nature, microbes often live in spatially structured groups such as biofilms where cells can create metabolic gradients by consuming and releasing nutrients. Consequently, cells experience different local microenvironments and vary in their phenotype. How does this phenotypic variation affect the ability of cells to cope with nutrient switches? Here, we address this question by growing dense populations of Escherichia coli in microfluidic chambers and studying a switch from glucose to acetate at the single-cell level. Before the switch, cells vary in their metabolic activity: some grow on glucose, while others cross-feed on acetate. After the switch, only few cells can resume growth after a period of lag. The probability to resume growth depends on a cells' phenotype prior to the switch: it is highest for cells cross-feeding on acetate, while it depends in a non-monotonic way on the growth rate for cells growing on glucose. Our results suggest that the strong phenotypic variation in spatially structured populations might enhance their ability to cope with fluctuating environments.
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