Population bottlenecks shape the evolution of cooperative traits in Myxococcus xanthus through life cycle trade-offs. This study shows that stringent bottlenecks favor growth and sporulation, while re...

Population bottlenecks shape the evolution of cooperative traits in Myxococcus xanthus through life cycle trade-offs. This study shows that stringent bottlenecks favor growth and sporulation, while re...

Conjugative plasmids are a key reservoir of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in commensal and pathogenic bacteria within the gut microbiome. Plasmid-dependent phage (PDPs) are a promising therapeutic op...

Sabnis et al. explain why non-conjugative plasmids move at a low rate in nature. While increased mobility can easily evolve by incorporating phage DNA into plasmids, this is disadvantageous because it...

The species that make up a microbial community determine its potential function. A major goal of microbial ecology is to make assemblages of microbes — synthetic communities — with targeted applicatio...

Mutational robustness is the persistence of a phenotype upon mutation. It facilitates molecular evolution and has been characterized in a variety of biological systems, but studies of prokaryotic prom...

Due to the prevalence and importance of dormant microbial forms in regulating microbial ecosystems, the generation of dormant structures, like spores, has been extensively studied. However, several aspects of the exit of bacterial spores from dormancy, i.e., the germination of spores, remain relatively unclear. Since the biology of cells before transitioning into spores and the biology of the spores themselves could potentially influence the germination process, we used Myxococcus xanthus as a model organism to demonstrate that Raman spectroscopy can be used to characterize the factors that affect the ability of individual cells and spores to sporulate and germinate, respectively. M. xanthus is a Gram-negative soil bacterium that forms spore-filled multicellular fruiting bodies upon starvation. Single-cell Raman spectral profiling revealed lower Raman peak intensities of nucleic acids as a marker for the beginning of sporulation. Moreover, Raman profiles of sporulating cells of M. xanthus demonstrated that the lipid peaks increased during the initial sporulation phase before decreasing during the late sporulation phase. We also observed higher carotenoid peaks in spores than in cells, which might explain the reason for spores being more tolerant to oxidative stress than the cells. Significantly, the trends in Raman bands of nucleic acids and proteins observed in the lab strain were also observed in the natural isolates. Furthermore, partial least squares regression (PLSR) analysis of peak intensities of the most significantly affected chemical groups demonstrated a strong correlation between Raman spectra and germination efficiencies of spores, suggesting that such spectral markers are potential indicators of the germination efficiency of the spore population.

In natural habitats, nutrient availability limits bacterial growth. We discovered that bacteria can overcome this limitation by acquiring nutrients by lysing neighboring cells through contact-dependen...

npj Antimicrobials and Resistance - Coevolutionary history of predation constrains the evolvability of antibiotic resistance in prey bacteria

Overuse of antibiotics is currently the primary reason for the rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), but researchers have shown that AMR can be found in soil bacterial communities due to microbial i...

The information provided on this page is a summary of the main rules and requirements for Postdoctoral Fellowships (PFs) and who can apply for them.

In the Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment, diploid yeast evolve to be tetraploid under selection for larger multicellular size, revealing how whole-genome duplication can arise due to its...