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Abstract Spatial organization of microbes in biofilms enables crucial community function such as division of labor. However, quantitative understanding of such emergent community properties remains limited due to a scarcity of tools for patterning heterogeneous biofilms. Here we develop a synthetic optogenetic toolkit ‘Multipattern Biofilm Lithography’ for rational engineering and orthogonal patterning of multi-strain biofilms, inspired by successive adhesion and phenotypic differentiation in natural biofilms. We apply this toolkit to profile the growth dynamics of heterogeneous biofilm communities, and observe the emergence of spatially modulated commensal relationships due to shared antibiotic protection against the beta-lactam ampicillin. Supported by biophysical modeling, these results yield in-vivo measurements of key parameters, e.g., molecular beta-lactamase production per cell and length scale of antibiotic zone of protection. Our toolbox and associated findings provide quantitative insights into the spatial organization and distributed antibiotic protection within biofilms, with direct implications for future biofilm research and engineering.
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Role of Synthetic Biofilms in Bed Evolution and the Formation of Sedimentary Structures
Abstract Microbes are known to shape topographies; however, mechanisms of biofilm‐sediment interactions and the dynamic evolution of biofilm‐covered bedforms remain poorly understood. Here, we explore the effects of synthetic biofilms on the geometry and temporal evolution of underwater bedforms through flume experiments. Our results demonstrate that synthetic biofilms can produce sedimentary structures similar to those formed by natural microbes, including wrinkles, pits, flip‐overs, roll‐ups, mat chips, and erosional edges. We observed the formation of wrinkles, a common geological feature, due to the accumulation of sand grains on the biofilms. Furthermore, we demonstrated that biofilms can reduce bed roughness by an order of magnitude in the low flow regime. However, the subsequent biofilm‐sediment interactions can increase local bedform size, forming multi‐scale geometries of bedforms. Our study improves the fundamental understanding of the landscape dynamics of bedforms covered by natural biofilms.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2236497
- PAR ID:
- 10580973
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.1029
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Geophysical Research Letters
- Volume:
- 52
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0094-8276
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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