Patterned Biofilm Formation Reveals a Mechanism for Structural Heterogeneity in Bacterial Biofilms
Patterned Biofilm Formation Reveals a Mechanism for Structural Heterogeneity in Bacterial Biofilms
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DOI：
10.1021/la402608z
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发表时间：
2013-09-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.9
通讯作者：
Ren, Dacheng
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gu, Huan;Hou, Shuyu;Ren, Dacheng
细菌生物膜无处不在，是人类慢性感染和工业中持续生物污染的主要原因。尽管细菌生物被膜具有重要意义，但生物被膜的形成机制和相关的药物耐受性仍不完全清楚。生物膜研究中的一个主要挑战是生物膜结构的内在异质性，这导致了细胞密度和基因表达的时空差异。为了了解和控制这种结构异质性，本研究使用带有图案化功能烷硫醇的表面来获得具有系统变化的簇大小和簇间距离的大肠杆菌细胞簇。定量成像分析的结果揭示了一个有趣的现象，即细胞群之间可以形成多细胞连接，这取决于相互作用的群的大小和它们之间的距离。此外，野生型E Colt RP437与其部分等基因突变体在生物膜花纹形成方面存在显著差异，表明某些细胞和遗传因素参与了细胞团之间的相互作用。特别是，自动诱导物-2介导的群体感应被发现是重要的。总的来说，这些结果提供了将细胞间信号和细胞团之间的相互作用与细菌生物膜的结构组织联系起来的缺失信息。
Bacterial biofilms are ubiquitous and are the major cause of chronic infections in humans and persistent biofouling in industry. Despite the significance of bacterial biofilms, the mechanism of biofilm formation and associated drug tolerance is still not fully understood. A major challenge in biofilm research is the intrinsic heterogeneity in the biofilm structure, which leads to temporal and spatial variation in cell density and gene expression. To understand and control such structural heterogeneity, surfaces with patterned functional alkanthiols were used in this study to obtain Escherichia coli cell clusters with systematically varied cluster size and distance between clusters. The results from quantitative imaging analysis revealed an interesting phenomenon in which multicellular connections can be formed between cell clusters depending on the size of interacting clusters and the distance between them. In addition, significant differences,in patterned biofilm formation were observed between wild-type E colt RP437 and some of its isogenic mutants, indicating that certain cellular and genetic factors are involved in interactions among cell clusters. In particular, autoinducer-2-mediated quorum sensing was found to be important. Collectively, these results, provide missing information that links cell-to-cell signaling and interaction among cell clusters to the structural organization of bacterial biofilms.