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| Cells in a symplasmatum and surrounded by a capsule, seen with transmission electron microscopy. |
'Curiouser and curiouser’, famously said Lewis Carrol’s Alice, as she was experiencing some very peculiar events in Wonderland. I have sometimes felt like Alice when I was studying the curious behavior of the bacterium Pantoea agglomerans [1], during my time in the Lab Leveau at UC Davis.
At first sight, Pantoea agglomerans looks quite ordinary. It grows as rods a few
micrometers long, it can swim with flagella and it feeds on all sorts of sugars.
It belongs to the family Enterobacteriaceae,
and thus it is a distant cousin of E.
coli. You can find P. agglomerans
in all sorts of environments, but it is particularly good at colonizing the
surface of plants, and in certain cases it competes with pathogens and thus keeps its plant host healthy (that is, it can serve as a biocontrol agent). Because it is a very good leaf colonizer, we have used it in
many studies of bacterial life in the ‘phyllosphere’ (the aerial surfaces of
plants), such as the one described in this previous post.
Now here’s what special, and actually
seemingly unique, about Pantoea bacteria.
Under certain conditions, instead of dividing and spreading as individual cells, the bacteria
stay close together and form an aggregate containing up to hundreds of tightly
packed cells. Aggregation is not uncommon in bacteria but, in the case of Pantoea, cells are constrained by a fibrillar layer, and surrounded by a thick capsule made of polysaccharides,
which indicates some level of cooperation and resources sharing (see image on top of the post). The resulting sausage-shaped structures are called symplasmata [2]. Interestingly, the species name 'agglomerans'
(forming
into a ball), which was coined by the great Dutch microbiologist and botanist Martinus Beijerinck in
a paper dating from 1888, probably refers to the species' ability to form symplasmata [3]. Although symplasmata have been known for a very long time, their importance and function in the environment is still a mystery. We have observed symplasmata on bean leaf surfaces, and
others have described them attached to the roots of rice plants (Achouak et al., 1994). What is their ecological role? Does it benefit the plant as well? We do not know yet.
