TY - JOUR A1 - Nikolic, Nela A1 - Dal Co, Alma A1 - Kiviet, Daniel J. A1 - Bergmiller, Tobias A1 - Littmann, Sten A1 - Kuypers, Marcel M. M. A1 - Ackermann, Martin A1 - Schreiber, Frank T1 - Cell-to-cell variation and specialization in sugar metabolism in clonal bacterial populations N2 - While we have good understanding of bacterial metabolism at the population level, we know little about the metabolic behavior of individual cells: do single cells in clonal populations sometimes specialize on different metabolic pathways? Such metabolic specialization could be driven by stochastic gene expression and could provide individual cells with growth benefits of specialization. We measured the degree of phenotypic specialization in two parallel metabolic pathways, the assimilation of glucose and arabinose. We grew Escherichia coli in chemostats, and used isotope-labeled sugars in combination with nanometer-scale secondary ion mass spectrometry and mathematical modeling to quantify sugar assimilation at the single-cell level. We found large variation in metabolic activities between single cells, both in absolute assimilation and in the degree to which individual cells specialize in the assimilation of different sugars. Analysis of transcriptional reporters indicated that this variation was at least partially based on cell-to-cell variation in gene expression. Metabolic differences between cells in clonal populations could potentially reduce metabolic incompatibilities between different pathways, and increase the rate at which parallel reactions can be performed. KW - Metabolism KW - Escherichia coli KW - Phenotypic diversity KW - Phenotypic heterogeneity PY - 2017 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-438873 UR - http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1007122 SN - 1553-7404 VL - 13 IS - 12 SP - e1007122, 1 EP - e1007122, 24 PB - Public Library of Science CY - Cambridge, United Kingdom AN - OPUS4-43887 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -