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Infectious disease

Microbes possess chemical memory

Molecule passes message to make biofilms to new generations

by Carmen Drahl
April 2, 2018 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 96, Issue 14

This false-colored image shows green, rod-shaped Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria atop a fibrous purple layer of biofilm.
Credit: Debra Weinstein, Sao-Mai Nguyen-Mau, and Vincent Lee/University of Maryland
In this false-colored image, cells of Pseudomonas aeruginosa (green) rest on a biofilm (purple). Each bacterium is 1–5 µm in length.
Structure of cyclic adenosine monophosphate.

They say elephants never forget, but microbes may have them beat. A new study suggests bacteria have a chemical memory of sorts that they pass on to descendants, aiding the entire colony in forming biofilms, the tenacious stuff that befouls hospital catheters and resists antibiotic treatment (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2018, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1720071115). Gerard C. L. Wong of UCLA and colleagues observed Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which forms lethal biofilm infections in people with cystic fibrosis, as the microbes interacted with the surface of a flow cell. Multiple teams’ work has shown that when bacteria sense a surface, they encode that knowledge of surface exposure chemically in the molecule cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP, shown). Wong’s team noticed a rhythmic rise and fall of cAMP levels in the bacteria, which was linked to activity of appendages that bacteria use to attach to surfaces. The team “was floored,” Wong says, to see that as the bacteria reproduced, descendants displayed a continuation of the same cAMP pattern. This rhythmic signal tells bacteria to stay put and become a biofilm, Wong explains. He hopes that studies like his will point the way to mitigating biofilms’ effects on diseases and biomedical devices.

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