PMID:11572999

Citation	Branda, SS, González-Pastor, JE, Ben-Yehuda, S, Losick, R and Kolter, R (2001) Fruiting body formation by Bacillus subtilis. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 98:11621-6
Abstract	Spore formation by the bacterium Bacillus subtilis has long been studied as a model for cellular differentiation, but predominantly as a single cell. When analyzed within the context of highly structured, surface-associated communities (biofilms), spore formation was discovered to have heretofore unsuspected spatial organization. Initially, motile cells differentiated into aligned chains of attached cells that eventually produced aerial structures, or fruiting bodies, that served as preferential sites for sporulation. Fruiting body formation depended on regulatory genes required early in sporulation and on genes evidently needed for exopolysaccharide and surfactin production. The formation of aerial structures was robust in natural isolates but not in laboratory strains, an indication that multicellularity has been lost during domestication of B. subtilis. Other microbial differentiation processes long thought to involve only single cells could display the spatial organization characteristic of multicellular organisms when studied with recent natural isolates.
Links	PubMed PMC58779 Online version:10.1073/pnas.191384198
Keywords	Bacillus subtilis/genetics; Bacillus subtilis/growth & development; Bacillus subtilis/physiology; Escherichia coli/genetics; Mutagenesis; Spores, Bacterial/cytology; Spores, Bacterial/genetics; Spores, Bacterial/physiology; beta-Galactosidase/genetics
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Annotations

Gene product	Qualifier	GO Term	Evidence Code	with/from	Aspect	Extension	Notes	Status
BACSU:SP0A	involved_in	GO:0090606: single-species surface biofilm formation	ECO:0000315: mutant phenotype evidence used in manual assertion		P		Seeded From UniProt	complete
BACSU:SP0A		GO:0032022: multicellular pellicle formation	ECO:0000315:		P		Figure 4A. shows that mutants lacking Spo0A failed to form pellicles.	complete CACAO 6144
BACSU:SFP		GO:0009059: macromolecule biosynthetic process	ECO:0000315:		P		Surfactants are known to be important for the erection of aerial hyphae in fungi and the streptomycetes, caused at least in part by their ability to lower the surface tension of water.. A mutant (sfp) lacking the phosphopantetheinyltransferase that activates the nonribosomal peptide synthetase that produces surfactin formed thick but completely flat pellicles (Fig. 4A). Similarly, sfp mutant colonies were flat and small, spreading very little on the agar surface (Fig. 4 B and C). Low-magnification microscopy revealed that these mutant colonies did form projecting columns, but these grew laterally and eventually fused with each other (Fig. 4C), leading to small colonies lacking aerial structures.	complete CACAO 2636

References

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