Chemotaxis towards autoinducer 2 mediates intra- and interspecies behaviors of Escherichia coli
Graduate Students Mini-Symposium
- Date: Sep 11, 2017
- Time: 01:15 PM - 01:50 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Leanid Laganenka
- MPI / Systems and Synthetic Microbiology
- Location: MPI for Terrestrial Microbiology
- Room: Lecture hall
- Host: Prof. Dr. Victor Sourjik
- Contact: victor.sourjik@synmikro.mpi-marburg.mpg.de
Many bacteria can communicate
with each other, coordinating and synchronizing their behavior by means of
production and sensing of extracellular signal molecules called autoinducers. A
universal autounducer AI-2 is the only established quorum-sensing molecule
produced by E. coli, though its
physiological role remains elusive. Here we show that motility and chemotaxis
towards self-produced AI-2 mediates collective behavior – autoaggregation – of E. coli. In contrast to previous
studies, our results thus show that autoaggregation and motility are not
mutually exclusive behaviors, but both functional flagellar apparatus and
chemotaxis are required for efficient autoaggregation at physiological cell
densities. Such AI-2 dependent autoaggregation
benefits bacteria by enhancing their stress resistance and promotes biofilm
formation.
We
further show that E. coli can employ
AI-2 produced by enteric bacterium Enterococcus
faecalis to perform collective behaviors at lower cell densities. This leads to co-aggregation between the
two species, subsequently enhancing E.
coli microcolony formation in static dual-species biofilms.