Asynchrony in the growth and motility responses to environmental changes by individual bacterial cells.
Knowing how individual cells respond to environmental changes helps one understand phenotypic diversity in a bacterial cell population, so we simultaneously monitored the growth and motility of isolated motile Escherichia coli cells over several generations by using a method called on-chip single-cell cultivation. Starved cells quickly stopped growing but remained motile for several hours before gradually becoming immotile. When nutrients were restored the cells soon resumed their growth and proliferation but remained immotile for up to six generations. A flagella visualization assay suggested that deflagellation underlies the observed loss of motility. This set of results demonstrates that single-cell transgenerational study under well-characterized environmental conditions can provide information that will help us understand distinct functions within individual cells.
Umehara
Senkei
S
Department of Life Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan.
Hattori
Akihiro
A
Inoue
Ippei
I
Yasuda
Kenji
K
D018407:Bacterial Physiological Phenomena; D004777:Environment; D004926:Escherichia coli / Q000502:physiology*; D010861:Fimbriae, Bacterial / Q000502:physiology; D005407:Flagella / Q000502:physiology*; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology