Asynchrony in the growth and motility responses to environmental changes by individual bacterial cells.

摘要: Knowing how individual cells respond to environmental changes helps one understand phenotypic diversity in a bacterial cell population, so we simultaneously monitored the growth and motility of isolated motile Escherichia coli over several generations by using method called on-chip single-cell cultivation. Starved quickly stopped growing but remained for hours before gradually becoming immotile. When nutrients were restored soon resumed their proliferation immotile up six generations. A flagella visualization assay suggested that deflagellation underlies observed loss motility. This set results demonstrates transgenerational study under well-characterized conditions can provide information will help us distinct functions within cells.