Hung Le
Aix-Marseille University - CNRS LCB, Marseille
Hunt to eat: metabolic reprogramming drives the dynamics of interbacterial predation
Decades of intensive agriculture practice have deprived soil microbial biodiversity, endangering food chain productivity. Amid these growing concerns, bacterial predators have recently come to the forefront for their role in shaping microbial soil ecosystems. Characterized as generalist predators, Myxococcus feed on a vast array of microorganisms, including phylogenetically diverse bacterial prey. In this talk, I will present our recent results obtained through experimental evolution in Myxococcus xanthus. We observed that more efficient predators tend to accumulate mutations that modify the intracellular Acetyl-CoA flux, leading to a metabolic shift favoring fatty acid degradation for energy production. One significant outcome of this adaptation is the constant expression of antioxidant genes, aimed at neutralizing reactive oxygen species generated during prey cell lysis. To conclude, our findings suggest the important role of metabolic reprogramming as a key evolutionary strategy in the ecological niches of bacterial predators.
References
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- S. Thiery, P. Turowski, J. E. Berleman, C. Kaimer, The predatory soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus combines a Tad- and an atypical type 3-like protein secretion system to kill bacterial cells. Cell Rep 40 (2022)