Beyond Syntrophy: Interspecies Microbial Fusion in a Clostridium Coculture
The team led by Pr. Papoutsakis of the University of Delaware has just disclosed how two different bacterial organisms, i.e., Clostridium ljungdahlii and C. acetobutylicum, engage in heterologous cell fusion leading to massive exchange of cellular material, including proteins and RNA, and the formation of persistent hybrid cells, well beyond strict syntrophy! Suspected to be widely distributed in nature, such fusion events had gone undetected so far.
Fluorescence microscopy and flow cytometry of one species with stained RNA and the other tagged with a fluorescent protein demonstrated extensive RNA exchange and identified hybrid cells, some of which continued to divide. The experimental setup implemented C. acetobutylicum-ZapA-FAST strain which was developed in 2019 as a first step to evaluate FAST of The Twinkle Factory for fluorescence reporting in anaerobic Clostridia.
“[These phenomena] may shed new light onto little-understood phenomena, such as antibiotic heteroresistance of pathogens, pathogen invasion of human tissues, and the evolutionary trajectory and persistence of unculturable bacteria”, Prof. Papoutsakis writes!
Read the full paper at mBio of the American Society for Microbiology.