ArticleMolecular biology and evolution2021
Embryo-Like Features in Developing Bacillus subtilis Biofilms.
Article in Molecular biology and evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- From Planktonic to Sedentary Lifestyle: Molecular Dissection of the Establishment and Maintenance of Mycobacterial Biofilm.ACS omega · 2026Article
- Genomic diversification, adaptive convergence, and regulatory rewiring in aging Escherichia coli colonies.BMC microbiology · 2026Article
- Regulatory rewiring drives intraspecies competition in Bacillus subtilis.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- A multicellular self-organized probiotic platform for oral delivery enhances intestinal colonization.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Evolutionary trends in the emergence of skeletal cell types.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Dynamics of bacterial operons during genome-wide stresses is influenced by premature terminations and internal promoters.Science advances · 2025Article
- Bacterial Amino Acid Auxotrophies Enable Energetically Costlier Proteomes.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Developmental phylotranscriptomics in grapevine suggests an ancestral role of somatic embryogenesis.Communications biology · 2025Article
- On the prospects of basal cognition research becoming fully evolutionary: promising avenues and cautionary notes.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2025Article
- Gene age and genome organization inFrontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Biofilms as more than the sum of their parts: lessons from developmental biology.Current opinion in microbiology · 2024Review
- Pathogenic avian mycoplasmas show phenotypic differences in their biofilm forming ability compared to non-pathogenic speciesBiofilm · 2024Article
- Macroevolutionary dynamics of gene family gain and loss along multicellular eukaryotic lineages.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Prevalence of diverse antimicrobial resistance genes and bacteria in sewage treatment plant-derived sludge environment.FEMS microbes · 2024Article
- Article
- Direct comparison of spatial transcriptional heterogeneity across diverse Bacillus subtilis biofilm communities.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Signatures of kin selection in a natural population of the bacteriaEvolution letters · 2023Article
- Pleomorphic Variants ofInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
- Taxonomically Restricted Genes in Bacillus may Form Clusters of Homologs and Can be Traced to a Large Reservoir of Noncoding Sequences.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Is biofilm formation intrinsic to the origin of life?Environmental microbiology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors at 6 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Correspondence between evolution and development has been discussed for more than two centuries. Recent work reveals that phylogeny-ontogeny correlations are indeed present in developmental transcriptomes of eukaryotic clades with complex multicellularity. Nevertheless, it has been largely ignored that the pervasive presence of phylogeny-ontogeny correlations is a hallmark of development in eukaryotes. This perspective opens a possibility to look for similar parallelisms in biological settings where developmental logic and multicellular complexity are more obscure. For instance, it has been increasingly recognized that multicellular behavior underlies biofilm formation in bacteria. However, it remains unclear whether bacterial biofilm growth shares some basic principles with development in complex eukaryotes. Here we show that the ontogeny of growing Bacillus subtilis biofilms recapitulates phylogeny at the expression level. Using time-resolved transcriptome and proteome profiles, we found that biofilm ontogeny correlates with the evolutionary measures, in a way that evolutionary younger and more diverged genes were increasingly expressed toward later timepoints of biofilm growth. Molecular and morphological signatures also revealed that biofilm growth is highly regulated and organized into discrete ontogenetic stages, analogous to those of eukaryotic embryos. Together, this suggests that biofilm formation in Bacillus is a bona fide developmental process comparable to organismal development in animals, plants, and fungi. Given that most cells on Earth reside in the form of biofilms and that biofilms represent the oldest known fossils, we anticipate that the widely adopted vision of the first life as a single-cell and free-living organism needs rethinking.
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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.