ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Cooperation and spatial self-organization determine rate and efficiency of particulate organic matter degradation in marine bacteria.
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 58 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cooperation in binary mixtures of active colloids.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Physical encounters impose a consistency-amount trade-off on bacterial group formation in marine environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Coordination costs may counteract the positive effects of a larger group size in determining the winner of between-group conflicts.iScience · 2026Article
- Deep-sea anaerobic microbial communities couple degradation of insoluble chitin to extracellular electron transfer.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Hypersensitivity of chitin degradation to initial species densities due to monomer diffusion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Model substrate particles uncover dynamics of microbial communities associated with particulate organic matter decomposition in soil.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Microbial cohorts: bringing ecological meaning to the modularity concept of co-occurrence networks.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Detergent-based separation of microbes from marine particles.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Degradation of extracellular polymeric substances shapes microbial community diversity.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Size matters: Anaerobic granules exhibit distinct ecological and physico-chemical gradients across biofilm size.Environmental science and ecotechnology · 2025Article
- The microbial phosphorus cycle in aquatic ecosystems.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2025Review
- Habitat fragmentation enhances microbial collective defence.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Polysaccharide quantification using microbial enzyme cocktails.Biology methods & protocols · 2025Article
- Bacterial clustering amplifies the reshaping of eutrophic plumes around marine particles: A hybrid data-driven model.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Experimental evolution of yeast shows that public-goods upregulation can evolve despite challenges from exploitative non-producers.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Single-cell measurement of microbial growth rate with Raman microspectroscopy.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2024Article
- A 'rich-get-richer' mechanism drives patchy dynamics and resistance evolution in antibiotic-treated bacteria.Molecular systems biology · 2024Article
- Bacteria face trade-offs in the decomposition of complex biopolymers.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The recycling of particulate organic matter (POM) by microbes is a key part of the global carbon cycle. This process is mediated by the extracellular hydrolysis of polysaccharides, which can trigger social behaviors in bacteria resulting from the production of public goods. Despite the potential importance of public good-mediated interactions, their relevance in the environment remains unclear. In this study, we developed a computational and experimental model system to address this challenge and studied how the POM depolymerization rate and its uptake efficiency (2 main ecosystem function parameters) depended on social interactions and spatial self-organization on particle surfaces. We found an emergent trade-off between rate and efficiency resulting from the competition between oligosaccharide diffusion and cellular uptake, with low rate and high efficiency being achieved through cell-to-cell cooperation between degraders. Bacteria cooperated by aggregating in cell clusters of ∼10 to 20 µm, in which cells were able to share public goods. This phenomenon, which was independent of any explicit group-level regulation, led to the emergence of critical cell concentrations below which degradation did not occur, despite all resources being available in excess. In contrast, when particles were labile and turnover rates were high, aggregation promoted competition and decreased the efficiency of carbon use. Our study shows how social interactions and cell aggregation determine the rate and efficiency of particulate carbon turnover in environmentally relevant scenarios.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.