Plasticity of growth laws tunes resource allocation strategies in bacteria
Fig 5
Motility cost of higher nutrient quality.
a, Motility assays on soft agar plates. Colonies on fast growth medium are smaller and show smooth edges (top panel). Colonies on slow growth medium are larger with ruffled edges (middle panel). A fraction of colonies on slow growth medium shows a longer-range swarming phenotype (bottom panel). (pie chart illustrations created with Biorender.) b, Relative quantification of proteins related to motility. Proteomics data from Hui et al. [6]. (color bar illustration created with Biorender.) c, Fraction of colonies exhibiting swarming on soft agar. For wildtype on glucose (blue circle), we observed no swarming, whereas on mannose a substantial number of colonies showed swarming (orange circles). The swapped promoter strain (YCE 119) lost the ability to swarm on mannose (orange triangles), but addition of cAMP (3.5mM) resulted in a large fraction of swarming colonies. 24 colonies were analyzed for WT grown in Glucose, 72 colonies were analyzed for WT grown in Mannose, 24 colonies were analyzed for YCE 119 grown in Glucose, 48 colonies were analyzed for YCE119 grown in mannose, and 24 colonies were analyzed for YSE 119 grown in Mannose with 3.5mM cAMP. d, We tracked growth of colony size over 3 days on minimal medium soft agar plates. Colony sizes of the wildtype increased much more on mannose (orange circles) than on glucose (blue circles) and exhibited rough irregular edges indicative of higher motility. The swapped promoter strain lost this enhanced motility on mannose and only showed an increase in colony size similar to the wildtype on glucose (yellow triangles). However, with the addition of cAMP (3.5mM) to mannose medium, the swapped promoter recovered high motility (yellow inverted triangles).24 colonies were analyzed for WT grown in Glucose, 72 colonies were analyzed for WT grown in Mannose, 24 colonies were analyzed for YCE 119 grown in Glucose, 48 colonies were analyzed for YCE119 grown in Mannose, and 24 colonies were analyzed for YSE 119 grown in Mannose with 3.5mM cAMP. Normalized mean area fold change plotted with standard deviation).