Live-cell imaging captures the heterogenity of bacterial growth within intracellular bacterial communities and demonstrates that the constituent bacteria are protected from clearance by antibiotics delivered with a physiologically relevant pharmacodynamic profile.
Bacterial CRISPR immunity tracks phage mutations, creating immune diversity in bacterial populations that parallels phage genetic diversity and patterns of phage evolution that are determined by the type and degree of immune cross-reactivity in the CRISPR system.
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.
Amichai Baichman-Kass, Tingting Song, Jonathan Friedman
High-throughput measurements of simplified bacterial communities find that when multiple species jointly inhibit a focal species of interest, their individual effects do not add up, but are dominated by the strongest single-species effect.
Disturbing the microbiota with antibiotics alters gut redox state via changes in electron acceptor availability, setting the stage for post-antibiotic succession.
Inés Martínez, Maria X Maldonado-Gomez ... Jens Walter
Experiments in ex-germ-free mice establish a measurable effect of colonization history on gut microbiota assembly, illuminating a potential cause for the high levels of unexplained individuality in host-associated microbial communities.
A novel species-sorting experiment finds that phylogenetically and functionally distinct microbial communities emerge under different temperature conditions due to the resuscitation of latent diversity.
Collapse of bacterial communities containing antibiotic-resistant and susceptible cells can be driven by increased population size or delayed drug exposure.
