Defined spatial structure stabilizes a synthetic multispecies bacterial community.

ABSTRACT: This paper shows that for microbial communities, "fences make good neighbors." Communities of soil microorganisms perform critical functions: controlling climate, enhancing crop production, and remediation of environmental contamination. Microbial communities in the oral cavity and the gut are of high biomedical interest. Understanding and harnessing the function of these communities is difficult: artificial microbial communities in the laboratory become unstable because of "winner-takes-all" competition among species. We constructed a community of three different species of wild-type soil bacteria with syntrophic interactions using a microfluidic device to control spatial structure and chemical communication. We found that defined microscale spatial structure is both necessary and suffici

SUBMITTER: Kim HJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2587551 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature