Spatial distributions of Pseudomonas fluorescens colony variants in mixed-culture biofilms

BMC Microbiology

Research Article

Raymond J Turner¹  Howard Ceri¹  Siyuan Wang¹  Matthew L Workentine² 

[1] Biofilm Research Group, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr NW, T2N 1N4, Calgary, AB, Canada;Biofilm Research Group, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr NW, T2N 1N4, Calgary, AB, Canada;Department of Medicine, McMaster University, 1200 Main St W, L8S 4K1, ONHamilton, Canada;

关键词: Yellow Fluorescent Protein;    Cyan Fluorescent Protein;    Planktonic Culture;    Ancestral Strain;    Small Colony Variant;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2180-13-175

 received in 2013-04-15, accepted in 2013-07-24,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe emergence of colony morphology variants in structured environments is being recognized as important to both niche specialization and stress tolerance. Pseudomonas fluorescens demonstrates diversity in both its natural environment, the rhizosphere, and in laboratory grown biofilms. Sub-populations of these variants within a biofilm have been suggested as important contributors to antimicrobial stress tolerance given their altered susceptibility to various agents. As such it is of interest to determine how these variants might be distributed in the biofilm environment.ResultsHere we present an analysis of the spatial distribution of Pseudomonas fluorescens colony morphology variants in mixed-culture biofilms with the wildtype phenotype. These findings reveal that two variant colony morphotypes demonstrate a significant growth advantage over the wildtype morphotype in the biofilm environment. The two variant morphotypes out-grew the wildtype across the entire biofilm and this occurred within 24 h and was maintained through to 96 h. This competitive advantage was not observed in homogeneous broth culture.ConclusionsThe significant advantage that the variants demonstrate in biofilm colonization over the wildtype denotes the importance of this phenotype in structured environments.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Workentine et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.