From pirates and killers: does metabolite diversity drive bacterial competition?
Bacteria engage in numerous collaborative and competitive interactions, which are often mediated by small molecule metabolites. Bacterial competition involves for example the production of compounds that effectively kill or inhibit growth of their neighbours but also the secretion of siderophores th...
Gespeichert in:
Veröffentlicht in: | Organic & biomolecular chemistry 2018-04, Vol.16 (16), p.2814-2819 |
---|---|
Hauptverfasser: | , , |
Format: | Artikel |
Sprache: | eng |
Schlagworte: | |
Online-Zugang: | Volltext |
Tags: |
Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
|
Zusammenfassung: | Bacteria engage in numerous collaborative and competitive interactions, which are often mediated by small molecule metabolites. Bacterial competition involves for example the production of compounds that effectively kill or inhibit growth of their neighbours but also the secretion of siderophores that allow securing the essential and fiercely embattled resource of ferric iron. Yet, the enormous diversity of metabolites produced has remained puzzling in many cases. We here present examples of both types of competition from our recent work. These include the human pathogen
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
producing HQNO derived 4-quinolone
N
-oxides varying in chain length and saturation as antibiotics against
Staphylococcus aureus
and two marine bacteria,
Shewanella algae
and
Vibrio alginolyticus
competing for iron acquisition
via
homodimeric and heterodimeric cyclic hydroxamate siderophores. In each case, bacteria not only produce one but a whole set of closely related metabolites encoded by a single biosynthetic gene cluster. Our recent work has demonstrated that individual metabolites can have significantly different biological activities and we speculate on the reasons for maintaining this metabolite diversity from the perspective of interspecies competition.
This article discusses interspecies competition by sets of closely related metabolites with significantly different biological activities. |
---|---|
ISSN: | 1477-0520 1477-0539 |
DOI: | 10.1039/c8ob00150b |