Abstract
Swimming motility is considered a beneficial trait among bacterial species as it enables movement across fluid environments and augments invasion of tissues within the host. However, non-swimming bacteria also flourish in fluid habitats, but how they effectively spread and colonize distant ecological niches remains unclear. We show that non-motile staphylococci can gain motility by hitchhiking on swimming bacteria, leading to extended and directed motion with increased velocity. This phoretic interaction was observed between Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus epidermidis and P. aeruginosa, as well as S. aureus and Escherichia coli, suggesting hitchhiking as a general translocation mechanism for non-motile staphylococcal species. By leveraging the motility of swimming bacteria, it was observed that staphylococci can colonize new niches that are less available in the absence of swimming carriers. This work highlights the importance of considering interactions between species within polymicrobial communities, in which bacteria can utilize each other as resources.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Gerardo Cárcamo-Oyarce, Erica Shapiro Frenkel and Jacob Witten for helpful feedback on the manuscript. TS was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant 1122374. NB was supported by NIH-NIEHS Training Grant in Toxicology T32 ES7020-37. AB was supported by Hugh Hampton Young Memorial Fellowship and NIH-NIAID F30 Fellowship 1F30AI110053. TC was supported by The Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship (BIOMUC). PSD acknowledged support from Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). This work is funded in part by the MRSEC Program of the National Science Foundation under award number DMR-0819762, the CAREER program of the National Science Foundation under award number PHY-1454673, NIH-NIBIB Grant R01EB017755 and P30ES002109 NIH-NIEHS Core Center. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
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Samad, T., Billings, N., Birjiniuk, A. et al. Swimming bacteria promote dispersal of non-motile staphylococcal species. ISME J 11, 1933–1937 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2017.23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2017.23
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