Self versus group-sensing in bacteria

细菌的自我感知与群体感知

• 批准号: 2106212
• 负责人: Martin Schuster
• 金额: $ 71.13万
• 依托单位: Oregon State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-07-01 至 2025-06-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2106212&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Self; versus; group; sensing; bacteria

This project investigates quorum sensing, a widespread cell-cell communication process in microbes relevant to natural ecosystems, agriculture, and medicine. Quorum sensing controls collective microbial behaviors such as interactions with plants and animals, growth on surfaces, and production of antibiotics. The studies proposed here will explore how coordinated behaviors in bacterial populations emerge from distinct quorum sensing mechanisms in single cells. These investigations will reveal general principles that govern communication and cooperation between individuals, and will provide the knowledge to engineer or manipulate quorum sensing pathways in a variety of biotechnological applications. The project will train a diverse group of graduate, undergraduate, and high school students in a cross-disciplinary environment that combines biological and mathematical approaches. It will further provide graduate students with science communication training and outreach opportunities to broaden their skill set.Quorum sensing is a ubiquitous mechanism in microbes that coordinates collective behaviors through self-produced chemical signals. Although major advances have been made in this field, there are still large gaps in our understanding of the functional capacity of quorum sensing. Quorum sensing is generally perceived as a cell density-dependent on/off switch that synchronizes gene expression in a population, although recent experimental studies show great response heterogeneity on a cellular scale. This project will holistically characterize the mechanisms that govern this spectrum of quorum responses in the widely studied bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The objective is to test a model that distinguishes between two quorum-sensing modes: group-sensing mediated by extracellular signal feedback, and self-sensing mediated by intracellular signal feedback. The central hypothesis is that genetic network architecture and environmental factors determine the quorum-sensing mode in P. aeruginosa, which in turn shapes response patterns at cellular and population scales. A range of experimental approaches and mathematical modeling will be employed to investigate this hypothesis. The results attained from this project will provide a systems-level understanding of the principles that govern decision-making in bacterial populations. They will find application in the design, analysis, and control of multicellular signaling circuits in synthetic biology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这个项目研究群体感应，这是一种与自然生态系统、农业和医学相关的微生物中广泛存在的细胞-细胞通信过程。群体感应控制集体微生物的行为，如与植物和动物的相互作用，表面生长，以及抗生素的产生。这里提出的研究将探索细菌种群中的协调行为如何从单细胞中不同的群体感应机制中出现。这些研究将揭示管理个人之间沟通和合作的一般原则，并将提供在各种生物技术应用中设计或操纵群体感应途径的知识。该项目将在结合生物和数学方法的跨学科环境中培训不同的研究生、本科生和高中生。它将进一步为研究生提供科学交流、培训和拓展机会，以扩大他们的技能集。群体感应是微生物中一种普遍存在的机制，它通过自己产生的化学信号来协调集体行为。虽然在这一领域已经取得了重大进展，但我们对群体感应的功能能力的理解仍然存在很大差距。群体感应通常被认为是一种依赖于细胞密度的开/关开关，它在群体中同步基因表达，尽管最近的实验研究表明，在细胞尺度上的反应具有很大的异质性。这个项目将全面描述在被广泛研究的铜绿假单胞菌中控制这种群体反应频谱的机制。目的是测试一个区分两种群体感知模式的模型：由细胞外信号反馈介导的群体感知和由细胞内信号反馈介导的自我感知。中心假设是遗传网络结构和环境因素决定了铜绿假单胞菌的群体感应模式，进而在细胞和种群规模上塑造了反应模式。我们将采用一系列实验方法和数学模型来研究这一假说。从这个项目中获得的结果将提供对管理细菌种群决策的原则的系统水平的理解。他们将在合成生物学的多细胞信号电路的设计、分析和控制中得到应用。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

Parameters, architecture and emergent properties of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa LasI/LasR quorum-sensing circuit

• DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2022.0825
• 发表时间: 2023-03-15
• 期刊: JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY INTERFACE
• 影响因子: 3.9
• 作者: Schuster，Martin;Li，Christina;Kuttler，Christina
• 通讯作者: Kuttler，Christina