scholarly journals Restricted Localization of Photosynthetic Intracytoplasmic Membranes (ICMs) in Multiple Genera of Purple Nonsulfur Bacteria

mBio ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Breah LaSarre ◽  
David T. Kysela ◽  
Barry D. Stein ◽  
Adrien Ducret ◽  
Yves V. Brun ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTIn bacteria and eukaryotes alike, proper cellular physiology relies on robust subcellular organization. For the phototrophic purple nonsulfur bacteria (PNSB), this organization entails the use of a light-harvesting, membrane-bound compartment known as the intracytoplasmic membrane (ICM). Here we show that ICMs are spatially and temporally localized in diverse patterns among PNSB. We visualized ICMs in live cells of 14 PNSB species across nine genera by exploiting the natural autofluorescence of the photosynthetic pigment bacteriochlorophyll (BChl). We then quantitatively characterized ICM localization using automated computational analysis of BChl fluorescence patterns within single cells across the population. We revealed that while many PNSB elaborate ICMs along the entirety of the cell, species across as least two genera restrict ICMs to discrete, nonrandom sites near cell poles in a manner coordinated with cell growth and division. Phylogenetic and phenotypic comparisons established that ICM localization and ICM architecture are not strictly interdependent and that neither trait fully correlates with the evolutionary relatedness of the species. The natural diversity of ICM localization revealed herein has implications for both the evolution of phototrophic organisms and their light-harvesting compartments and the mechanisms underpinning spatial organization of bacterial compartments.IMPORTANCEMany bacteria organize their cellular space by constructing subcellular compartments that are arranged in specific, physiologically relevant patterns. The purple nonsulfur bacteria (PNSB) utilize a membrane-bound compartment known as the intracytoplasmic membrane (ICM) to harvest light for photosynthesis. It was previously unknown whether ICM localization within cells is systematic or irregular and if ICM localization is conserved among PNSB. Here we surveyed ICM localization in diverse PNSB and show that ICMs are spatially organized in species-specific patterns. Most strikingly, several PNSB resolutely restrict ICMs to regions near the cell poles, leaving much of the cell devoid of light-harvesting machinery. Our results demonstrate that bacteria of a common lifestyle utilize unequal portions of their intracellular space to harvest light, despite light harvesting being a process that is intuitively influenced by surface area. Our findings therefore raise fundamental questions about ICM biology and evolution.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Breah LaSarre ◽  
David T. Kysela ◽  
Barry D. Stein ◽  
Adrien Ducret ◽  
Yves V. Brun ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTIn diverse bacteria, proper cellular physiology requires the utilization of protein- or membrane-bound compartments that afford specific metabolic capabilities. One such compartment is the light-harvesting intracytoplasmic membrane (ICM) of purple nonsulfur bacteria (PNSB). Here we reveal that ICMs are subject to differential spatial organization among PNSB. We visualized ICMs in live cells of fourteen PNSB species by exploiting the natural autofluorescence of the photosynthetic machinery. We then quantitatively characterized ICM localization using automated computational analysis of autofluorescence patterns within single cells across the population. Our studies revealed that ICMs are localized in distinct subcellular patterns that differ between species; some PNSB elaborate ICMs throughout the cell, while others spatially restrict ICM to varying degrees. The most highly-restricted ICMs were localized in a specific pattern corresponding to progression of cell growth and division. An identical pattern of ICM restriction was conserved across at least two genera. Phylogenetic and phenotypic comparisons established that ICM localization and ICM architecture are not strictly interdependent and that neither trait fully correlates with the evolutionary relatedness of the species. This discovery of new diversity in bacterial cell organization has implications for understanding both the mechanisms underpinning spatial arrangement of bacterial compartments and the potential benefits of adopting different spatiotemporal patterns.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qinle Ba ◽  
Guruprasad Raghavan ◽  
Kirill Kiselyov ◽  
Ge Yang

In eukaryotic cells, lysosomes are distributed in the cytoplasm as individual membrane-bound compartments to degrade macromolecules and to control cellular metabolism. A fundamental yet unanswered question is whether and, if so, how individual lysosomes are spatially organized so that their functions can be coordinated and integrated to meet changing needs of cells. To address this question, we analyze their collective behavior in cultured cells using spatial statistical techniques. We find that in single cells, lysosomes maintain nonrandom, stable, yet distinct spatial distributions, which are mediated by the coordinated effects of the cytoskeleton and lysosomal biogenesis on different lysosomal subpopulations. Furthermore, we find that throughout the intracellular space, lysosomes form dynamic clusters that substantially increase their interactions with endosomes. Together, our findings reveal the spatial organization of lysosomes at the whole-cell scale and provide new insights into how organelle interactions are mediated and regulated over the entire intracellular space.


Author(s):  
Tianming Zhou ◽  
Ruochi Zhang ◽  
Jian Ma

The spatial organization of the genome in the cell nucleus is pivotal to cell function. However, how the 3D genome organization and its dynamics influence cellular phenotypes remains poorly understood. The very recent development of single-cell technologies for probing the 3D genome, especially single-cell Hi-C (scHi-C), has ushered in a new era of unveiling cell-to-cell variability of 3D genome features at an unprecedented resolution. Here, we review recent developments in computational approaches to the analysis of scHi-C, including data processing, dimensionality reduction, imputation for enhancing data quality, and the revealing of 3D genome features at single-cell resolution. While much progress has been made in computational method development to analyze single-cell 3D genomes, substantial future work is needed to improve data interpretation and multimodal data integration, which are critical to reveal fundamental connections between genome structure and function among heterogeneous cell populations in various biological contexts. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science, Volume 4 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.


Author(s):  
Pahnit Seriburi ◽  
Ashutosh Shastry ◽  
Angelique Van’t Wout ◽  
John Mittler ◽  
Shih-Hui Chao ◽  
...  

Single-cell impedance spectroscopy integrated with lab-on-a-chip systems provides a direct and minimally invasive approach for monitoring and characterizing properties of individual cells in real-time. Here we investigate the theoretical potential and limitations of this technique for analyzing single membrane-bound particles as small as 100 nm in diameter. Our theoretical model suggests a lower limit of detection for single cells on the order of a few microns.


Science ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 362 (6413) ◽  
pp. eaau1783 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan Bintu ◽  
Leslie J. Mateo ◽  
Jun-Han Su ◽  
Nicholas A. Sinnott-Armstrong ◽  
Mirae Parker ◽  
...  

The spatial organization of chromatin is pivotal for regulating genome functions. We report an imaging method for tracing chromatin organization with kilobase- and nanometer-scale resolution, unveiling chromatin conformation across topologically associating domains (TADs) in thousands of individual cells. Our imaging data revealed TAD-like structures with globular conformation and sharp domain boundaries in single cells. The boundaries varied from cell to cell, occurring with nonzero probabilities at all genomic positions but preferentially at CCCTC-binding factor (CTCF)- and cohesin-binding sites. Notably, cohesin depletion, which abolished TADs at the population-average level, did not diminish TAD-like structures in single cells but eliminated preferential domain boundary positions. Moreover, we observed widespread, cooperative, multiway chromatin interactions, which remained after cohesin depletion. These results provide critical insight into the mechanisms underlying chromatin domain and hub formation.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Toscano-Ochoa ◽  
Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo

Processing time-dependent information requires cells to quantify the durations of past regulatory events and program the time span of future signals. Such timer mechanisms are difficult to implement at the level of single cells, however, due to saturation in molecular components and stochasticity in the limited intracellular space. Multicellular implementations, on the other hand, outsource some of the components of information-processing circuits to the extracellular space, and thereby might escape those constraints. Here we develop a theoretical framework, based on a trilinear coordinate representation, to study the collective behavior of a three-strain bacterial population under stationary conditions. This framework reveals that distributing different processes (in our case the production, detection and degradation of a time-encoding signal) across distinct bacterial strains enables the robust implementation of a multicellular timer. Our analysis also shows the circuit to be easily tunable by varying the relative frequencies of the bacterial strains composing the consortium.


Author(s):  
Kenneth H. Hu ◽  
John P. Eichorst ◽  
Chris S. McGinnis ◽  
David M. Patterson ◽  
Eric D. Chow ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTSpatial transcriptomics seeks to integrate single-cell transcriptomic data within the 3-dimensional space of multicellular biology. Current methods use glass substrates pre-seeded with matrices of barcodes or fluorescence hybridization of a limited number of probes. We developed an alternative approach, called ‘ZipSeq’, that uses patterned illumination and photocaged oligonucleotides to serially print barcodes (Zipcodes) onto live cells within intact tissues, in real-time and with on-the-fly selection of patterns. Using ZipSeq, we mapped gene expression in three settings: in-vitro wound healing, live lymph node sections and in a live tumor microenvironment (TME). In all cases, we discovered new gene expression patterns associated with histological structures. In the TME, this demonstrated a trajectory of myeloid and T cell differentiation, from periphery inward. A variation of ZipSeq efficiently scales to the level of single cells, providing a pathway for complete mapping of live tissues, subsequent to real-time imaging or perturbation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 207 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Löchte ◽  
Sharon Waichman ◽  
Oliver Beutel ◽  
Changjiang You ◽  
Jacob Piehler

Interactions of proteins in the plasma membrane are notoriously challenging to study under physiological conditions. We report in this paper a generic approach for spatial organization of plasma membrane proteins into micropatterns as a tool for visualizing and quantifying interactions with extracellular, intracellular, and transmembrane proteins in live cells. Based on a protein-repellent poly(ethylene glycol) polymer brush, micropatterned surface functionalization with the HaloTag ligand for capturing HaloTag fusion proteins and RGD peptides promoting cell adhesion was devised. Efficient micropatterning of the type I interferon (IFN) receptor subunit IFNAR2 fused to the HaloTag was achieved, and highly specific IFN binding to the receptor was detected. The dynamics of this interaction could be quantified on the single molecule level, and IFN-induced receptor dimerization in micropatterns could be monitored. Assembly of active signaling complexes was confirmed by immunostaining of phosphorylated Janus family kinases, and the interaction dynamics of cytosolic effector proteins recruited to the receptor complex were unambiguously quantified by fluorescence recovery after photobleaching.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wiggert J. Altenburg ◽  
N. Amy Yewdall ◽  
Daan F. M. Vervoort ◽  
Marleen H. M. E. van Stevendaal ◽  
Alexander F. Mason ◽  
...  

AbstractThe cell cytosol is crowded with high concentrations of many different biomacromolecules, which is difficult to mimic in bottom-up synthetic cell research and limits the functionality of existing protocellular platforms. There is thus a clear need for a general, biocompatible, and accessible tool to more accurately emulate this environment. Herein, we describe the development of a discrete, membrane-bound coacervate-based protocellular platform that utilizes the well-known binding motif between Ni2+-nitrilotriacetic acid and His-tagged proteins to exercise a high level of control over the loading of biologically relevant macromolecules. This platform can accrete proteins in a controlled, efficient, and benign manner, culminating in the enhancement of an encapsulated two-enzyme cascade and protease-mediated cargo secretion, highlighting the potency of this methodology. This versatile approach for programmed spatial organization of biologically relevant proteins expands the protocellular toolbox, and paves the way for the development of the next generation of complex yet well-regulated synthetic cells.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (146) ◽  
pp. 20180406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton Kan ◽  
Ilenne Del Valle ◽  
Tim Rudge ◽  
Fernán Federici ◽  
Jim Haseloff

Dense bacterial communities, known as biofilms, can have functional spatial organization driven by self-organizing chemical and physical interactions between cells, and their environment. In this work, we investigated intercellular adhesion, a pervasive property of bacteria in biofilms, to identify effects on the internal structure of bacterial colonies. We expressed the self-recognizing ag43 adhesin protein in Escherichia coli to generate adhesion between cells, which caused aggregation in liquid culture and altered microcolony morphology on solid media. We combined the adhesive phenotype with an artificial colony patterning system based on plasmid segregation, which marked clonal lineage domains in colonies grown from single cells. Engineered E. coli were grown to colonies containing domains with varying adhesive properties, and investigated with microscopy, image processing and computational modelling techniques. We found that intercellular adhesion elongated the fractal-like boundary between cell lineages only when both domains within the colony were adhesive, by increasing the rotational motion during colony growth. Our work demonstrates that adhesive intercellular interactions can have significant effects on the spatial organization of bacterial populations, which can be exploited for biofilm engineering. Furthermore, our approach provides a robust platform to study the influence of intercellular interactions on spatial structure in bacterial populations.


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