BACTERIAL CELL-CELL SIGNALING AND COMMUNITY SUCCESSION IN BIOFILMS

这个子项目是许多研究子项目中利用 资源由NIH/NCRR资助的中心拨款提供。子项目和 调查员(PI)可能从NIH的另一个来源获得了主要资金， 并因此可以在其他清晰的条目中表示。列出的机构是 该中心不一定是调查人员的机构。 船体生物污损每年给美国海军造成的燃油效率损失高达数亿美元。虽然真核生物，如藻类和藤壶，是限制船体性能的主要阻力来源，但细菌的发展为这些生物的定居奠定了基础。 船体表面有生物膜。最近的研究表明，几个丰富的海洋细菌群体分泌化学信号，用于诱导水下表面细胞之间的非凡协调；当条件最佳时，这些信号分子会触发细胞结构的生长，将单个附着的细菌细胞转化为真正的三维细菌生物膜。这些细胞间通讯的发现导致了这样的假设，即发育中的生物膜是由不同细菌群紧密协调的序列组成的，真核生物可能会“窃听”细菌细胞之间的信号，以优化它们在生物膜上招募的机会。如果这些假设是真的，在演替过程中仅阻止一个细菌群的发育可能会减缓甚至可能阻止导致拖累的真核生物的招募。 尽管目前对细菌生物膜中细胞-细胞信号的了解主要是通过实验室培养纯细菌物种获得的，但海洋细菌群落的分类和生理多样性需要另一种不受细胞培养限制和偏见的方法。在这里，我建议应用新的、不依赖于培养的、基于色谱/质谱学的技术来测量特定于分类单元的细胞生长，并检验以下假设：1)在船体上的海洋生物膜中存在有规律的细菌群演替，2)这种演替是由细胞-细胞信号分子调节的。这些技术是可靠的、定量的，并且具有与基于核酸的方法类似的分类解析，后者往往更繁琐，定量更少。一旦完全开发，这些方法将提供一个强大和用户友好的分析工具，以测试当前和未来的防污染技术在抑制生物膜中包含的特定细菌分类群生长方面的效果。

This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Biofouling of ship hulls costs the United States Navy hundreds of millions of dollars each year in lost fuel efficiency. Although eukaryotic biofoulers, such as algae and barnacles, are responsible for the majority of drag that limits hull performance, the stage for colonization by these organisms is set by the development of bacterial biofilms on the hull surface. Recent studies have shown that several abundant groups of marine bacteria secrete chemical signals that are used to induce extraordinary coordination between cells on submerged surfaces; when conditions are optimal these signaling molecules trigger the growth of cell structures that transform individual attached bacterial cells to a true three-dimensional bacterial biofilm. The discovery of these cell-cell communications has led to the hypotheses that developing biofilms are populated by a tightly-orchestrated succession of different bacterial groups and that eukaryotic biofoulers may "eavesdrop" on signaling between bacterial cells to optimize their chances for recruitment on the biofilm. If these hypotheses are true, arresting the development of just one bacterial group in the succession has the potential to slow, or even possibly prevent, the recruitment of drag-causing eukaryotes. Although the current understanding of cell-cell signaling in bacterial biofilms has been gained primarily through cultivation of pure species of bacteria in the laboratory, the taxonomic and physiological diversity of marine bacterial communities warrants an additional approach that is free of the limits and biases of cell cultivation. Here, I propose to apply novel, cultivation-independent, chromatography/mass spectrometry-based technologies to measure taxon-specific cell growth and to test the hypotheses that: 1) there is a regular succession of bacterial groups in marine biofilms on ship's hulls, and 2) this succession is regulated by cell-cell signaling molecules. These technologies, are reliable, quantitative, and have taxonomic resolution similar to nucleic acids-based methods that are often more cumbersome and less quantitative. Once fully developed, these approaches will provide a powerful and user-friendly analytical tool to test the efficacy of current and future anti-fouling technologies on retarding the growth of specific bacterial taxa contained in biofilms.