ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
Multicellular behaviour enables cooperation in microbial cell aggregates.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond probiotics and pathobionts: mechanistic roles of enterococcus-derived bioactive components in health and disease.Folia microbiologica · 2026Review
- Modeling Multiscale Architecture of Biofilm Extracellular Matrix and Its Role in Oxygen Transport.Biotechnology and bioengineering · 2026Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Reversible Bacterial Depletion Aggregation and Restabilization by Water-Soluble Polymers.Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids · 2025Article
- Degradation of extracellular polymeric substances shapes microbial community diversity.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Construction of a syntrophicSynthetic biology (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Bacteria face trade-offs in the decomposition of complex biopolymers.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Balance between asymmetric allocation and repair of somatic damage in unicellular life forms as an ancient form of r/K selection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Unicellular life balances asymmetric allocation and repair of somatic damage representing the origin of r/K selection.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Interspecies interactions determine growth dynamics of biopolymer-degrading populations in microbial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Bacteria evolve macroscopic multicellularity by the genetic assimilation of phenotypically plastic cell clustering.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Cell aggregation is associated with enzyme secretion strategies in marine polysaccharide-degrading bacteria.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Bacterial growth in multicellular aggregates leads to the emergence of complex life cycles.Current biology : CB · 2022Article
- Article
- The Many Faces ofMicroorganisms · 2021Review
- Single cell ecology.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Exopolysaccharide-mediated surface penetration as new virulence trait inCommunicative & integrative biology · 2019Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Oligosaccharides produced from the extracellular hydrolysis of biological materials can act as common goods that promote cooperative growth in microbial populations, whereby cell-cell aggregation increases both the per capita availability of resources and the per-cell growth rate. However, aggregation can also have detrimental consequences for growth, as gradients form within aggregates limiting the resource accessibility. We built a computational model, which predicts cooperation is restricted in dense cell aggregates larger than 10 µm because of the emergence of polymer and oligomer counter gradients. We compared these predictions to experiments performed with two well-studied alginate-degrading strains of
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