ReviewmBio2022
Navigating Environmental Transitions: the Role of Phenotypic Variation in Bacterial Responses.
Review in mBio, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 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
40 citing papers in PubMed.
- Perturbing H-NS function reveals roles in restricting virulence heterogeneity and pathogen adaptation.PLoS pathogens · 2026Article
- Functional diversity and ecological consequences of endophytic Bacillus-plant interactions.Folia microbiologica · 2026Review
- From nature to clinic: tracking genetic and environmental drivers of Stenotrophomonas maltophilia pathogenicity.Archives of microbiology · 2026Review
- Interindividual differences in acidogenic potential of the salivary microbiome after mouthwash exposure.BMC microbiology · 2026Article
- In Situ Quantification of Bacterial Surface Charge at the Single-Cell Level for Modeling Transport under Electric Fields.Environmental science & technology · 2026Article
- Dynamics of phage-host interactions in Bacteroides fragilis resolved by single-cell transcriptomics.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A nutrient bottleneck controls antibiotic efficacy in structured bacterial populations.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Integrated FTIR and Whole-Genome Sequencing Reveal Scale-Dependent Genotype-Phenotype Relationships in Multidrug-ResistantPathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- A Ratiometric pH Sensor for Gram-Positive and Gram-Negative Bacteria.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2026Article
- Altering chemotaxis as a strategy to enhance the foraging range of motility-restricted bacteria.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Perturbing H-NS function reveals roles in restricting virulence heterogeneity and pathogen adaptation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Unraveling complexity in climate change effects on beneficial plant-microbe interactions: mechanisms, resilience, and future directions.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Cell-to-Cell and Patient-to-Patient Variability in Antimicrobial Resistance.Microorganisms · 2025Review
- Comparative transcriptomics analysis of theBiofilm · 2025Article
- The Constrained Disorder Principle: A Paradigm Shift for Accurate Interactome Mapping and Information Analysis in Complex Biological Systems.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Lipid-based nanocarriers for enhanced gentamicin delivery: a comparative study of liquid crystal nanoparticles and liposomes against Escherichia coli biofilms.Drug delivery and translational research · 2025Article
- A metagenomic approach to One Health surveillance of antimicrobial resistance in a UK veterinary centre.Microbial genomics · 2025Article
- Tracing the evolutionary dynamics of carbapenem-resistant Escherichia coli in recurrent and multi-site infections.Gut pathogens · 2025Article
- Resilient by Design: Environmental Stress Promotes Biofilm Formation and Multi-Resistance in Poultry-AssociatedMicroorganisms · 2025Article
- Hosts and Commensal Bacteria Synergistically Antagonize Opportunistic Pathogens at the Single-Cell Resolution.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The ability of bacteria to respond to changes in their environment is critical to their survival, allowing them to withstand stress, form complex communities, and induce virulence responses during host infection. A remarkable feature of many of these bacterial responses is that they are often variable across individual cells, despite occurring in an isogenic population exposed to a homogeneous environmental change, a phenomenon known as phenotypic heterogeneity. Phenotypic heterogeneity can enable bet-hedging or division of labor strategies that allow bacteria to survive fluctuating conditions. Investigating the significance of phenotypic heterogeneity in environmental transitions requires dynamic, single-cell data. Technical advances in quantitative single-cell measurements, imaging, and microfluidics have led to a surge of publications on this topic. Here, we review recent discoveries on single-cell bacterial responses to environmental transitions of various origins and complexities, from simple diauxic shifts to community behaviors in biofilm formation to virulence regulation during infection. We describe how these studies firmly establish that this form of heterogeneity is prevalent and a conserved mechanism by which bacteria cope with fluctuating conditions. We end with an outline of current challenges and future directions for the field. While it remains challenging to predict how an individual bacterium will respond to a given environmental input, we anticipate that capturing the dynamics of the process will begin to resolve this and facilitate rational perturbation of environmental responses for therapeutic and bioengineering purposes.
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.