Bacteria Form Biofilms Like Settlers Form Cities
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Bacteria form biofilms like settlers form cities:
Microbiologists have long adopted the language of human settlement to describe how bacteria live and grow: They "invade" and "colonize." Relations dwelling in close proximity are "colonies."
By pairing super-resolution imaging technology with a computational algorithm, a new study in Nature Communications confirms that this metaphor is more apt than scientists may have realized. The findings show that, as individual bacteria multiply and grow into a dense and sticky biofilm, such as the community that forms dental plaque, their growth patterns and dynamics mirror those seen in the growth of cities.
"We take this 'satellite-level' view, following hundreds of bacteria distributed on a surface from their initial colonization to biofilm formation," says Hyun (Michel) Koo, a professor in Penn's School of Dental Medicine and senior author on the work. "And what we see is that, remarkably, the spatial and structural features of their growth are analogous to what we see in urbanization."
This new perspective on how biofilms grow could help inform efforts to either promote the growth of beneficial microbes or break up and kill undesirable biofilms with therapeutics.
[...] Overall, the growth patterns were reminiscent of the formation of urban areas, the team found. Some individual "settlers" grew, expanding into small bacteria "villages." Then, as the boundaries of the villages grew and, in some cases met, they joined to form larger villages and eventually "cities." Some of these cities then merged to form larger "megacities."
Surprising the researchers, their results showed that only a subset of the bacteria grew. "We thought that the majority of the individual bacteria would end up growing," says Koo. "But the actual number was less than 40%, with the rest either dying off or being engulfed by the growth of other microcolonies."
[...] On both the individual bacteria and biofilm-wide scale, the researchers confirmed that the gluelike secretion known as extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) enabled bacteria to pack together closely and firmly in the biofilm. When they introduced an enzyme that digested EPS, the communities dissolved and returned to a collection of individual bacteria.
"Without EPS, they lose the ability to densely pack and form these 'cities,'" says Koo.
Journal Reference:
Amauri J. Paula, et al. Dynamics of bacterial population growth in biofilms resemble spatial and structural aspects of urbanization, Nature Communications (2020). (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15165-4)
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