Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China.
Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China.
Biophys J. 2021 May 4;120(9):1615-1624. doi: 10.1016/j.bpj.2021.02.021. Epub 2021 Feb 23.
In a dilute liquid environment in which cell-cell interaction is negligible, flagellated bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, perform chemotaxis by biased random walks alternating between run-and-tumble. In a two-dimensional crowded environment, such as a bacterial swarm, the typical behavior of run-and-tumble is absent, and this raises the question whether and how bacteria can perform chemotaxis in a swarm. Here, by examining the chemotactic behavior as a function of the cell density, we showed that chemotaxis is surprisingly enhanced because of cell crowding in a bacterial swarm, and this enhancement is correlated with increase in the degree of cell body alignment. Cells tend to form clusters that move collectively in a swarm with increased effective run length, and we showed analytically that this resulted in increased drift velocity toward attractants. We also explained the enhancement by stochastically simulating bacterial chemotaxis in a swarm. We found that cell crowding in a swarm enhances chemotaxis if the cell-cell interactions used in the simulation induce cell-cell alignment, but it impedes chemotaxis if the interactions are collisions that randomize cell moving direction. Therefore, collective motion in a bacterial swarm enhances chemotaxis.
在细胞间相互作用可以忽略不计的稀溶液环境中,鞭毛细菌(如大肠杆菌)通过在奔跑和旋转之间交替进行随机游走来进行趋化作用。在二维拥挤的环境中,如细菌群中,不存在典型的奔跑和旋转行为,这就提出了一个问题,即在细菌群中细菌是否能够以及如何进行趋化作用。在这里,我们通过检查细胞密度作为函数的趋化行为,表明由于细菌群中的细胞拥挤,趋化作用令人惊讶地增强了,这种增强与细胞体对齐程度的增加相关。细胞倾向于形成集群,这些集群在细菌群中集体移动,有效游动距离增加,我们通过分析表明,这导致了对吸引物的漂移速度增加。我们还通过在细菌群中随机模拟细菌趋化作用来解释这种增强。我们发现,如果模拟中使用的细胞间相互作用诱导细胞间对齐,则细菌群中的细胞拥挤会增强趋化作用,但如果相互作用是随机改变细胞运动方向的碰撞,则会阻碍趋化作用。因此,细菌群的集体运动增强了趋化作用。