Metabolic interactions between dynamic bacterial subpopulations
- California Institute of Technology, United States
- Princeton University, United States
Abstract
Individual microbial species are known to occupy distinct metabolic niches within multi-species communities. However, it has remained largely unclear whether metabolic specialization can similarly occur within a clonal bacterial population. More specifically, it is not clear what functions such specialization could provide and how specialization could be coordinated dynamically. Here, we show that exponentially growing Bacillus subtilis cultures divide into distinct interacting metabolic subpopulations, including one population that produces acetate, and another population that differentially expresses metabolic genes for the production of acetoin, a pH-neutral storage molecule. These subpopulations exhibit distinct growth rates and dynamic interconversion between states. Furthermore, acetate concentration influences the relative sizes of the different subpopulations. These results show that clonal populations can use metabolic specialization to control the environment through a process of dynamic, environmentally-sensitive state-switching.
Data availability
Data is included in supplementary files
Article and author information
Author details
Sophia Hsin-Jung Li
Funding
National Institute for Health Research (RO1GM079771)
- Adam Z Rosenthal
- Yutao Qi
- Jin Park
- Michael B Elowitz
DOE Biochronicity (DOE Biochronicity)
- Adam Z Rosenthal
- Yutao Qi
- Jin Park
- Sophia Hsin-Jung Li
Center for Environmental Microbial Interactions at Caltech
- Adam Z Rosenthal
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2018, Rosenthal et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Metabolic interactions between dynamic bacterial subpopulations
eLife 7:e33099.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.33099
