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Comment
. 2015 Sep 1;112(35):10827-8.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1513608112. Epub 2015 Aug 24.

Antibiotics and the art of bacterial war

Daniel M Cornforth  1 , Kevin R Foster  2
Affiliations
Comment

Antibiotics and the art of bacterial war

Daniel M Cornforth et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
The activation and suppression of chemical warfare in Streptomyces. (A) Interactions between colonies of actinomycete bacteria. Streptomyces coelicolor (right) responds to an adjacent colony by initiating production of the red-pigmented antibiotics prodiginine and actinorhodin. Image credit to Matthew Traxler; see ref. for more details. (B) Two key experimental outcomes seen in Abrudan et al. (4). The authors studied how well a focal strain (green) inhibited an overlain target strain (gray box) when growing in the absence, or presence, of a modifier strain (blue). Strains that were passive when growing alone often became inhibitory when a modifier strain was added (Top). By contrast, strains that were aggressive when alone frequently had this aggression suppressed by the presence of a modifier strain (Bottom).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment on

References

    1. Tzu S, Sun Tzu on the Art of War: The Oldest Military Treatise in the World, Translated from the Chinese with Introduction and Critical Notes, trans Giles L (1910) (Luzac & Company, London)
    1. Mitri S, Foster KR. The genotypic view of social interactions in microbial communities. Annu Rev Genet. 2013;47:247–273. - PubMed
    1. Yim G, Wang HH, Davies J. Antibiotics as signalling molecules. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2007;362(1483):1195–1200. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Abrudan M, et al. Socially mediated induction and suppression of antibiosis during bacterial coexistence. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2015;112:11054–11059. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Kelsic ED, Zhao J, Vetsigian K, Kishony R. Counteraction of antibiotic production and degradation stabilizes microbial communities. Nature. 2015;521(7553):516–519. - PMC - PubMed

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