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Rapid chemotactic response enables marine bacteria to exploit ephemeral microscale nutrient patches.

ABSTRACT: Because ocean water is typically resource-poor, bacteria may gain significant growth advantages if they can exploit the ephemeral nutrient patches originating from numerous, small sources. Although this interaction has been proposed to enhance biogeochemical transformation rates in the ocean, it remains questionable whether bacteria are able to efficiently use patches before physical mechanisms dissipate them. Here we show that the rapid chemotactic response of the marine bacterium Pseudoalteromonas haloplanktis substantially enhances its ability to exploit nutrient patches before they dissipate. We investigated two types of patches important in the ocean: nutrient pulses and nutrient plumes, generated for example from lysed algae and sinking organic particles, respectively. We used microfluidic devices to create patches with environmentally realistic dimensions and dynamics. The accumulation of P. haloplanktis in response to a nutrient pulse led to formation of bacterial hot spots within tens of seconds, resulting in a 10-fold higher nutrient exposure for the fastest 20% of the population compared with nonmotile cells. Moreover, the chemotactic response of P. haloplanktis was >10 times faster than the classic chemotaxis model Escherichia coli, leading to twice the nutrient exposure. We demonstrate that such rapid response allows P. haloplanktis to colonize nutrient plumes for realistic particle sinking speeds, with up to a 4-fold nutrient exposure compared with nonmotile cells. These results suggest that chemotactic swimming strategies of marine bacteria in patchy nutrient seascapes exert strong influence on carbon turnover rates by triggering the formation of microscale hot spots of bacterial productivity.

SUBMITTER: Stocker R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2393791 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Rapid chemotactic response enables marine bacteria to exploit ephemeral microscale nutrient patches.

Stocker Roman R Seymour Justin R JR Samadani Azadeh A Hunt Dana E DE Polz Martin F MF Polz Martin F MF

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20080312 11

Because ocean water is typically resource-poor, bacteria may gain significant growth advantages if they can exploit the ephemeral nutrient patches originating from numerous, small sources. Although this interaction has been proposed to enhance biogeochemical transformation rates in the ocean, it remains questionable whether bacteria are able to efficiently use patches before physical mechanisms dissipate them. Here we show that the rapid chemotactic response of the marine bacterium Pseudoalterom ...[more]

PMID: 18337491

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Project description:Double-strand breaks (DSBs) can lead to the loss of genetic information and cell death. Consequently, cells in all domains of life have evolved mechanisms to repair DSBs, including through homologous recombination. Although recombination has been well characterized, the spatial organization of this process in living cells remains poorly understood. Here, we introduced site-specific DSBs in Caulobacter crescentus, and then used time-lapse microscopy to visualize the homology search, DSB repair, and the resegregation of chromosomal DNA. Even loci tethered to opposite cell poles can efficiently release, pair to enable recombination-based repair, and then resegregate to their original locations. Resegregation occurs independent of DNA replication and without disrupting global chromosome organization. Origin-proximal regions are resegregated by the same machinery, ParABS, used to segregate undamaged chromosomes following DNA replication. In contrast, origin-distal regions efficiently resegregate after a DSB independent of ParABS, and likely without dedicated segregation proteins. Instead, we propose that a physical, spring-like force drives the resegregation of origin-distal loci after DSB repair. Caulobacter cells were depleted of DnaA for 1.5 h before synchronization. Swarmer cells were then released into DnaA depleting conditions (without IPTG) and double-strand breaks were induced for 1 h by the addition of 500 ?M vanillate. For control sample, no vanillate was added. Formadehyde (Sigma) was then added to the final concentration of 1%. Formadehyde crosslinks protein-DNA and DNA-DNA together, thereby capturing the structure of the chromosome at the time of fixation. Fixation was performed at the cell density of OD600 = 0.2. The crosslinking reactions were allowed to proceed for 30 minutes at 25 °C before quenching with 2.5 M glycine at a final concentration of 0.125 M. Fixed cells were then pelleted by centrifugation and subsequently washed twice with 1x M2 buffer (6.1 mM Na2HPO4, 3.9 mM KH2PO4, 9.3 mM NH4Cl, 0.5 mM MgSO4, 10 ?M FeSO4, 0.5 mM CaCl2) before resuspending in 1x TE buffer (10 mM Tris-HCl pH 8.0 and 1 mM EDTA) to a final concentration of 107 cells per µl. Resuspended cells were then divided into 25 µl aliquots and stored at -80 °C for no more than 2 weeks. Each Hi-C experiment was performed using two of the 25 µL aliquots. Chromosome conformation capture with next-generation seqeuncing (Hi-C) was carried out exactly as described previously (Le et al., 2013 PMID: 24158908)

Dataset Information

Rapid chemotactic response enables marine bacteria to exploit ephemeral microscale nutrient patches.

Publications

Rapid chemotactic response enables marine bacteria to exploit ephemeral microscale nutrient patches.

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