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Hampered motility promotes the evolution of wrinkly phenotype in Bacillus subtilis
BACKGROUND: Selection for a certain trait in microbes depends on the genetic background of the strain and the selection pressure of the environmental conditions acting on the cells. In contrast to the sessile state in the biofilm, various bacterial cells employ flagellum-dependent motility under pla...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6192195/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30326845 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12862-018-1266-2 |
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author | Richter, Anne Hölscher, Theresa Pausch, Patrick Sehrt, Tim Brockhaus, Franziska Bange, Gert Kovács, Ákos T |
author_facet | Richter, Anne Hölscher, Theresa Pausch, Patrick Sehrt, Tim Brockhaus, Franziska Bange, Gert Kovács, Ákos T |
author_sort | Richter, Anne |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Selection for a certain trait in microbes depends on the genetic background of the strain and the selection pressure of the environmental conditions acting on the cells. In contrast to the sessile state in the biofilm, various bacterial cells employ flagellum-dependent motility under planktonic conditions suggesting that the two phenotypes are mutually exclusive. However, flagellum dependent motility facilitates the prompt establishment of floating biofilms on the air-medium interface, called pellicles. Previously, pellicles of B. subtilis were shown to be preferably established by motile cells, causing a reduced fitness of non-motile derivatives in the presence of the wild type strain. RESULTS: Here, we show that lack of active flagella promotes the evolution of matrix overproducers that can be distinguished by the characteristic wrinkled colony morphotype. The wrinkly phenotype is associated with amino acid substitutions in the master repressor of biofilm-related genes, SinR. By analyzing one of the mutations, we show that it alters the tetramerization and DNA binding properties of SinR, allowing an increased expression of the operon responsible for exopolysaccharide production. Finally, we demonstrate that the wrinkly phenotype is advantageous when cells lack flagella, but not in the wild type background. CONCLUSIONS: Our experiments suggest that loss of function phenotypes could expose rapid evolutionary adaptation in bacterial biofilms that is otherwise not evident in the wild type strains. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12862-018-1266-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6192195 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-61921952018-10-22 Hampered motility promotes the evolution of wrinkly phenotype in Bacillus subtilis Richter, Anne Hölscher, Theresa Pausch, Patrick Sehrt, Tim Brockhaus, Franziska Bange, Gert Kovács, Ákos T BMC Evol Biol Research Article BACKGROUND: Selection for a certain trait in microbes depends on the genetic background of the strain and the selection pressure of the environmental conditions acting on the cells. In contrast to the sessile state in the biofilm, various bacterial cells employ flagellum-dependent motility under planktonic conditions suggesting that the two phenotypes are mutually exclusive. However, flagellum dependent motility facilitates the prompt establishment of floating biofilms on the air-medium interface, called pellicles. Previously, pellicles of B. subtilis were shown to be preferably established by motile cells, causing a reduced fitness of non-motile derivatives in the presence of the wild type strain. RESULTS: Here, we show that lack of active flagella promotes the evolution of matrix overproducers that can be distinguished by the characteristic wrinkled colony morphotype. The wrinkly phenotype is associated with amino acid substitutions in the master repressor of biofilm-related genes, SinR. By analyzing one of the mutations, we show that it alters the tetramerization and DNA binding properties of SinR, allowing an increased expression of the operon responsible for exopolysaccharide production. Finally, we demonstrate that the wrinkly phenotype is advantageous when cells lack flagella, but not in the wild type background. CONCLUSIONS: Our experiments suggest that loss of function phenotypes could expose rapid evolutionary adaptation in bacterial biofilms that is otherwise not evident in the wild type strains. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12862-018-1266-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2018-10-16 /pmc/articles/PMC6192195/ /pubmed/30326845 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12862-018-1266-2 Text en © The Author(s). 2018 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Richter, Anne Hölscher, Theresa Pausch, Patrick Sehrt, Tim Brockhaus, Franziska Bange, Gert Kovács, Ákos T Hampered motility promotes the evolution of wrinkly phenotype in Bacillus subtilis |
title | Hampered motility promotes the evolution of wrinkly phenotype in Bacillus subtilis |
title_full | Hampered motility promotes the evolution of wrinkly phenotype in Bacillus subtilis |
title_fullStr | Hampered motility promotes the evolution of wrinkly phenotype in Bacillus subtilis |
title_full_unstemmed | Hampered motility promotes the evolution of wrinkly phenotype in Bacillus subtilis |
title_short | Hampered motility promotes the evolution of wrinkly phenotype in Bacillus subtilis |
title_sort | hampered motility promotes the evolution of wrinkly phenotype in bacillus subtilis |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6192195/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30326845 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12862-018-1266-2 |
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