Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China.
Phys Rev E. 2017 Jun;95(6-1):062404. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.95.062404. Epub 2017 Jun 7.
Cells can adjust to their growth environments and regulate their behavior accordingly. To study how cells accomplish this growth-dependent adjustment from the molecular to the behavioral level, we used bacterial chemotaxis as a model system to explore the behavioral difference for bacteria grown in nutrient-rich and nutrient-poor media. We found that bacteria grown in a nutrient-poor medium exhibit faster chemotaxis adaptation, and this enables them to respond more rapidly to a changing environment and increases their ability to localize to a nutrient concentration peak. We identified the molecular mechanisms behind this behavioral difference through coarse-grained modeling, and demonstrated its physiological consequences by simulating bacterial chemotactic motion in spatiotemporally varying environments and in a static environment with a nutrient concentration peak.
细胞可以根据其生长环境进行调整，并相应地调节其行为。为了研究细胞如何从分子水平到行为水平完成这种依赖于生长的调整，我们使用细菌趋化性作为模型系统，探索了在营养丰富和营养贫瘠的培养基中生长的细菌的行为差异。我们发现，在营养贫瘠的培养基中生长的细菌表现出更快的趋化适应，这使它们能够更快速地对环境变化做出反应，并提高它们在营养浓度峰值处定位的能力。我们通过粗粒化建模确定了这种行为差异背后的分子机制，并通过模拟时空变化环境中的细菌趋化运动和具有营养浓度峰值的静态环境中的细菌趋化运动，证明了其生理后果。
