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Guet CC, Bruneaux L, Oikonomou P, Aldana M, Cluzel P. Monitoring lineages of growing and dividing bacteria reveals an inducible memory of mar operon expression. Front Microbiol 2023; 14:1049255. [PMID: 37485524 PMCID: PMC10359894 DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2023.1049255] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/20/2022] [Accepted: 03/24/2023] [Indexed: 07/25/2023] Open
Abstract
In Gram negative bacteria, the multiple antibiotic resistance or mar operon, is known to control the expression of multi-drug efflux genes that protect bacteria from a wide range of drugs. As many different chemical compounds can induce this operon, identifying the parameters that govern the dynamics of its induction is crucial to better characterize the processes of tolerance and resistance. Most experiments have assumed that the properties of the mar transcriptional network can be inferred from population measurements. However, measurements from an asynchronous population of cells can mask underlying phenotypic variations of single cells. We monitored the activity of the mar promoter in single Escherichia coli cells in linear micro-colonies and established that the response to a steady level of inducer was most heterogeneous within individual colonies for an intermediate value of inducer. Specifically, sub-lineages defined by contiguous daughter-cells exhibited similar promoter activity, whereas activity was greatly variable between different sub-lineages. Specific sub-trees of uniform promoter activity persisted over several generations. Statistical analyses of the lineages suggest that the presence of these sub-trees is the signature of an inducible memory of the promoter state that is transmitted from mother to daughter cells. This single-cell study reveals that the degree of epigenetic inheritance changes as a function of inducer concentration, suggesting that phenotypic inheritance may be an inducible phenotype.
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Affiliation(s)
- Calin C. Guet
- Institute for Biophysical Dynamics and the James Franck Institute, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States
- Molecular and Cellular Biology Department and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States
- Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Klosterneuburg, Austria
| | - Luke Bruneaux
- Institute for Biophysical Dynamics and the James Franck Institute, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States
- Molecular and Cellular Biology Department and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States
| | - Panos Oikonomou
- Institute for Biophysical Dynamics and the James Franck Institute, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States
- Molecular and Cellular Biology Department and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States
- Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States
| | - Maximino Aldana
- Instituto de Ciencias Físicas and Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Cuernavaca, Mexico
| | - Philippe Cluzel
- Institute for Biophysical Dynamics and the James Franck Institute, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States
- Molecular and Cellular Biology Department and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States
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