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Microbiology

Bacterial communities as capitalist economies

Nature volume 497, pages 321–322 (2013)Cite this article

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Tracking the behaviour of bacteria as they group together on a surface reveals a 'rich-get-richer' mechanism in which polysaccharide deposition and cellular location amplify in a positive feedback loop. See Letter p.388

Multicellular communities of single-celled organisms attached to a surface are the predominant form of life on Earth. Development of these biofilms involves distinct stages of self-organization, starting with a single cell that senses and approaches a surface. Numerous factors have been identified that affect the formation, structure, metabolism and regulation of biofilms at the population level, but their formation has rarely been quantitatively investigated at the single-cell level. On page 388 of this issue, Zhao et al.1 track the fate of individual bacterial cells from reversible surface attachment to microcolony formation. They show that the early stages of cell-to-surface contact are highly dynamic, with the bacteria exploring the surface and priming their environment for subsequent biofilm developmentFootnote 1.

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Figure 1: A positive feed-forward circuit steers biofilm formation.

Notes

  1. *This article and the paper under discussion1 were published online on 8 May 2013.

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  1. Ute Römling is in the Department of Microbiology, Cell and Tumor Biology, Karolinska Institutet, 171 77 Stockholm, Sweden.,

    Ute Römling

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  1. Ute Römling
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Correspondence to Ute Römling.

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Römling, U. Bacterial communities as capitalist economies. Nature 497, 321–322 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12103

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