Journal: Microbial Cell

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Publisher

Shared Science Publishers

Journal Volumes

ISSN

2311-2638

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2019 - 201912020 - 20232
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Publications 1 - 3 of 3
  • Bacterial maze runners reveal hidden diversity in chemotactic performance
    Item type: Review Article
    Salek, M. Mehdi; Carrara, Francesco; Fernandez, Vicente; et al. (2019)
    Microbial Cell
    Chemotaxis allows microorganisms to exploit gradients in chemical stimuli to find nutrient resources and hosts or escape noxious substances. Thus, the life of individual microbes in their natural environments is a continual sequence of decisions based on the perceived chemical gradients. However, it has remained unclear to what extent the chemotaxis properties vary among cells of one species, and whether there is a spectrum of different ‘decision makers’ within populations of bacteria. In our recent study (Salek, Carrara et al., Nature Communications 10 (1), 1877), we combine microfluidic experiments with mathematical modeling to demonstrate that even in clonal populations, bacteria are individuals with different abilities to climb chemical gradients.
  • Raman-based sorting of microbial cells to link functions to their genes
    Item type: Journal Article
    Lee, Kang Soo; Wagner, Michael; Stocker, Roman (2020)
    Microbial Cell
    In our recent work, we developed an optofluidic plat-form that allows a direct link to be made between the phenotypes (functions) and the genotypes (genes) of microbial cells within natural communities. By combin-ing stable isotope probing, optical tweezers, Raman microspectroscopy, and microfluidics, the platform performs automated Raman-based sorting of taxa from within a complex community in terms of their functional properties. In comparison with manual sort-ing approaches, our method provides high throughput (up to 500 cells per hour) and very high sorting accura-cy (98.3 ± 1.7%), and significantly reduces the human labour required. The system provides an efficient manner to untangle the contributions of individual members within environmental and host-associated microbiomes. In this News and Thoughts, we provide an overview of our platform, describe potential appli-cations, suggest ways in which the system could be improved, and discuss future directions in which Ra-man-based analysis of microbial populations might be developed.
  • Ribose 5-phosphate: the key metabolite bridging the metabolisms of nucleotides and amino acids during stringent response in Escherichia coli?
    Item type: Journal Article
    Grucela, Paulina Katarzyna; Fuhrer, Tobias; Sauer, Uwe; et al. (2023)
    Microbial Cell
    The bacterial stringent response and its effector alarmone guano -sine penta-or tetra - phosphates (p)ppGpp are vital for bacterial tolerance and survival of various stresses in environments (including antibiotics) and host cells (virulence). (p)ppGpp does so by binding to its numerous target pro-teins and reprograming bacterial transcriptome to tune down the synthesis of nucleotides and rRNA/tRNA, and up-regulate amino acid biosynthesis genes. Recent identification of more novel (p)ppGpp direct binding proteins in Esche-richia coli and their deep studies have unveiled unprecedented details of how (p)ppGpp coordinates the nucleotide and amino acid metabolic pathways upon stringent response; however, the mechanistic link between nucleotide and amino acid metabolisms remains still incompletely understood. Here we propose the metabolite ribose 5'-phosphate as the key link between nucleo-tide and amino acid metabolisms and a working model integrating both the transcriptional and metabolic effects of (p)ppGpp on E. coli physiological ad-aptation during the stringent response.
Publications 1 - 3 of 3