Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, United States.
Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University, Princeton, United States.
Elife. 2022 Jun 1;11:e76380. doi: 10.7554/eLife.76380.
Bacteria are ubiquitous in our daily lives, either as motile planktonic cells or as immobilized surface-attached biofilms. These different phenotypic states play key roles in agriculture, environment, industry, and medicine; hence, it is critically important to be able to predict the conditions under which bacteria transition from one state to the other. Unfortunately, these transitions depend on a dizzyingly complex array of factors that are determined by the intrinsic properties of the individual cells as well as those of their surrounding environments, and are thus challenging to describe. To address this issue, here, we develop a generally-applicable biophysical model of the interplay between motility-mediated dispersal and biofilm formation under positive quorum sensing control. Using this model, we establish a universal rule predicting how the onset and extent of biofilm formation depend collectively on cell concentration and motility, nutrient diffusion and consumption, chemotactic sensing, and autoinducer production. Our work thus provides a key step toward quantitatively predicting and controlling biofilm formation in diverse and complex settings.
细菌在我们的日常生活中无处不在，它们可以是游动的浮游细胞，也可以是固定在表面的附着生物膜。这些不同的表型状态在农业、环境、工业和医学中都起着关键作用；因此，能够预测细菌从一种状态转变为另一种状态的条件是至关重要的。不幸的是，这些转变取决于一系列令人眼花缭乱的复杂因素，这些因素取决于单个细胞的固有特性以及它们周围环境的特性，因此难以描述。为了解决这个问题，在这里，我们开发了一个普遍适用的生物物理模型，用于描述在正群体感应控制下，运动介导的扩散和生物膜形成之间的相互作用。使用这个模型，我们建立了一个普遍的规则，预测生物膜形成的开始和程度如何共同取决于细胞浓度和运动性、营养物质的扩散和消耗、趋化感应和自动诱导物的产生。我们的工作为在不同和复杂的环境中定量预测和控制生物膜形成提供了关键的一步。
