ArticleCurrent biology : CB2022
Bacterial growth in multicellular aggregates leads to the emergence of complex life cycles.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2022. 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.
- To Move or Not to Move: When and How Bacteria Suppress Flagellar Motility.Molecular microbiology · 2026Review
- 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
- Direct benefits are not necessary for the evolution of multicellularity.Nature ecology & evolution · 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
- Spatial self-organization of confined bacterial suspensions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Top-Down Coercive Mechanisms and the Major Transitions in Evolution.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- Sticky enzymes: increased metabolic efficiency via substrate-dependent enzyme clustering.PRX life · 2025Article
- Interactions at sea: on the microbiome life-cycle and biogeochemical processes.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2025Article
- Bacterial extracellular vesicle: A non-negligible component in biofilm life cycle and challenges in biofilm treatments.Biofilm · 2024Review
- Article
- Unravelling the Roles of Bacterial Nanomachines Bistability in Pathogens' Life Cycle.Microorganisms · 2024Review
- Marine bacteriamBio · 2024Article
- Multicellular dynamics and wealth distribution in bacteria.Molecular systems biology · 2024Article
- Multicellular magnetotactic bacteria are genetically heterogeneous consortia with metabolically differentiated cells.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Physical constraints during Snowball Earth drive the evolution of multicellularity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Bacteria contribute exopolysaccharides to an algal-bacterial joint extracellular matrix.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2024Article
- Bacterial genome size and gene functional diversity negatively correlate with taxonomic diversity along a pH gradient.Nature communications · 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
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Abstract
Facultative multicellular behaviors expand the metabolic capacity and physiological resilience of bacteria. Despite their ubiquity in nature, we lack an understanding of how these behaviors emerge from cellular-scale phenomena. Here, we show how the coupling between growth and resource gradient formation leads to the emergence of multicellular lifecycles in a marine bacterium. Under otherwise carbon-limited growth conditions, Vibrio splendidus 12B01 forms clonal multicellular groups to collectively harvest carbon from soluble polymers of the brown-algal polysaccharide alginate. As they grow, groups phenotypically differentiate into two spatially distinct sub-populations: a static "shell" surrounding a motile, carbon-storing "core." Differentiation of these two sub-populations coincides with the formation of a gradient in nitrogen-source availability within clusters. Additionally, we find that populations of cells containing a high proportion of carbon-storing individuals propagate and form new clusters more readily on alginate than do populations with few carbon-storing cells. Together, these results suggest that local metabolic activity and differential partitioning of resources leads to the emergence of reproductive cycles in a facultatively multicellular bacterium.
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