Self-organized canals enable long range directed material transport in bacterial communities
- Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
- Southern University of Science and Technology, China
- Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Abstract
Long-range material transport is essential to maintain the physiological functions of multicellular organisms such as animals and plants. By contrast, material transport in bacteria is often short-ranged and limited by diffusion. Here we report a unique form of actively regulated long-range directed material transport in structured bacterial communities. Using Pseudomonas aeruginosa colonies as a model system, we discover that a large-scale and temporally evolving open channel system spontaneously develops in the colony via shear-induced banding. Fluid flows in the open channels support high-speed (up to 450 µm/s) transport of cells and outer membrane vesicles over centimeters, and help to eradicate colonies of a competing species Staphylococcus aureus. The open channels are reminiscent of human-made canals for cargo transport, and the channel flows are driven by interfacial tension mediated by cell-secreted biosurfactants. The spatial-temporal dynamics of fluid flows in the open channels are qualitatively described by flow profile measurement and mathematical modeling. Our findings demonstrate that mechanochemical coupling between interfacial force and biosurfactant kinetics can coordinate large-scale material transport in primitive life forms, suggesting a new principle to engineer self-organized microbial communities.
Data availability
All data are available in the main text or the Supplementary Information.
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Author details
Funding
Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (No. 2020YFA0910700)
- Yilin Wu
Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee (No. 14306820,14307821,RFS2021-4S04 and CUHK Direct Grants)
- Yilin Wu
Guangdong Natural Science Foundation (No. 2020B1515020003)
- Liang Yang
Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (No. 2019A1515110640)
- Yingdan Zhang
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2022, Li 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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Self-organized canals enable long range directed material transport in bacterial communities
eLife 11:e79780.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.79780
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