Risk-reward trade-off during carbon starvation generates dichotomy in motility endurance among marine bacteria.

Copiotrophic marine bacteria contribute to the control of carbon storage in the ocean by remineralizing organic matter. Motility presents copiotrophs with a risk-reward trade-off: it is highly beneficial in seeking out sparse nutrient hotspots, but energetically costly. Here we studied the motility endurance of 26 marine isolates, representing 18 species, using video microscopy and cell tracking over 2 days of carbon starvation.

The contribution of pelagic fungi to ocean biomass.

Metagenomic analysis has recently unveiled the widespread presence of pelagic fungi in the global ocean, yet their quantitative contribution to carbon stocks remains elusive, hindering their incorporation into biogeochemical models. Here, we revealed the biomass of pelagic fungi in the open-ocean water column by combining ergosterol extraction, Calcofluor-White staining, catalyzed reporter deposition fluorescence in situ hybridization (CARD-FISH), and microfluidic mass sensor techniques. We compared fungal biomass with the biomass of other more studied microbial groups in the ocean such as archaea and bacteria.

Cell size, density, and nutrient dependency of unicellular algal gravitational sinking velocities.

Eukaryotic phytoplankton, also known as algae, form the basis of marine food webs and drive marine carbon sequestration. Algae must regulate their motility and gravitational sinking to balance access to light at the surface and nutrients in deeper layers. However, the regulation of gravitational sinking remains largely unknown, especially in motile species.

Physiological basis for atmospheric methane oxidation and methanotrophic growth on air.

Atmospheric methane oxidizing bacteria (atmMOB) constitute the sole biological sink for atmospheric methane. Still, the physiological basis allowing atmMOB to grow on air is not well understood. Here we assess the ability and strategies of seven methanotrophic species to grow with air as sole energy, carbon, and nitrogen source.

Single-cell mass distributions reveal simple rules for achieving steady-state growth.

Microbiologists have watched clear liquid turn cloudy for over 100 years. While the cloudiness of a culture is proportional to its total biomass, growth rates from optical density measurements are challenging to interpret when cells change size. Many bacteria adjust their size at different steady-state growth rates, but also when shifting between starvation and growth.

Bacterial growth in multicellular aggregates leads to the emergence of complex life cycles.

Facultative multicellular behaviors expand the metabolic capacity and physiological resilience of bacteria. Despite their ubiquity in nature, we lack an understanding of how these behaviors emerge from cellular-scale phenomena. Here, we show how the coupling between growth and resource gradient formation leads to the emergence of multicellular lifecycles in a marine bacterium.

ARC: An Open Web-Platform for Request/Supply Matching for a Prioritized and Controlled COVID-19 Response.

In 2020 the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic putting entire governments and civil societies in crisis mode. Around the globe unprecedented shortages of equipment and qualified personnel were reported in hospitals and diagnostic laboratories. When a crisis is global, supply chains are strained worldwide and external help may not be readily available.

Exploiting rRNA operon copy number to investigate bacterial reproductive strategies.

The potential for rapid reproduction is a hallmark of microbial life, but microbes in nature must also survive and compete when growth is constrained by resource availability. Successful reproduction requires different strategies when resources are scarce and when they are abundant, but a systematic framework for predicting these reproductive strategies in bacteria has not been available. Here, we show that the number of ribosomal RNA operons (rrn) in bacterial genomes predicts two important components of reproduction-growth rate and growth efficiency-which are favoured under contrasting regimes of resource availability.

The Microbial Olympics 2016.

Following the success of the inaugural games, the Microbial Olympics return with a new series of events and microbial competitors. The games may have moved to a new hosting venue, but the dedication to training, fitness, competition (and yes, education and humour) lives on.

The physiology and ecological implications of efficient growth.

The natural habitats of microbes are typically spatially structured with limited resources, so opportunities for unconstrained, balanced growth are rare. In these habitats, selection should favor microbes that are able to use resources most efficiently, that is, microbes that produce the most progeny per unit of resource consumed. On the basis of this assertion, we propose that selection for efficiency is a primary driver of the composition of microbial communities.

rrnDB: improved tools for interpreting rRNA gene abundance in bacteria and archaea and a new foundation for future development.

Microbiologists utilize ribosomal RNA genes as molecular markers of taxonomy in surveys of microbial communities. rRNA genes are often co-located as part of an rrn operon, and multiple copies of this operon are present in genomes across the microbial tree of life. rrn copy number variability provides valuable insight into microbial life history, but introduces systematic bias when measuring community composition in molecular surveys.