Cited by 530Bacterial biofilms and quorum sensingBacterial Genetics and BiotechnologyMicrobial Community Ecology and Physiology

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Bacteria as Multicellular Organisms

Shapiro, James A.·1988·Scientific American

DOI 10.1038/scientificamerican0688-82

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“These results provide further evidence that bacterial populations behave rather like multicellular organisms consisting of several specialised subpopulations than as a homogeneous population (Shapiro 1988; Aguilar et al. 2007).”
Background
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“Although stigmergy has been typically regarded in the macro frame, such as termite mounds, it has been identified as fully operative in the swarming behaviors of unicellular organisms such as myxobacteria in which the stigmergic cues are regarded as chemical interactions between cells [46].”
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“The switch between a planktonic, swimming phenotype and a sessile phenotype occurs frequently in the prokaryotic world and may constitute the rule rather than the exception.(21) The swarming ability of Proteus mirabilis, a Gram-negative opportunistic pathogen of the human urinary tract, provides one of the most striki…”
Background
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“Second, in many cases, the ecological relevant unit of a bacterial life cycle is not the individual cell, but the colony [58,71].”
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“Away from the boundaries, we often observed cell alignment at the rim of the colony towards the empty agar plate (Figure 4b) as reported previously (Shapiro and Dworkin, 1988; Shapiro and Hsut, 1989; Shapiro, 1995).”
BackgroundMethodResult
Colonial and Cellular Polymorphism in Xenorhabdus luminescens
Hurlbert, R. E., Xu, J., & Small, C. L. (1989) · Applied and Environmental Microbiology · doi:10.1128/aem.55.5.1136-1143.1989 · Cited by 33
“luminescens RH/1 are seen to consist of cells with a pattern of movement similar to that described for other swarmers (23, 37, 38).”
Background
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“This is supported by the well-known observation that single-celled organisms can behave as multicellular systems using precisely these processes (10) particularly in the face of high-stress events (11-13).”
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Altered Gene Expression and Intracellular Changes of the Viable But Nonculturable State in Ralstonia solanacearum by Copper Treatment
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“It has been frequently reported that cell aggregation and pattern formation might be triggered by oxidative stress, such as that triggered by H2O2 (Blat and Eisenbach, 1995; Budrene and Berg, 1991) and may provide the living cells in the cluster with nutrients released from lysing or dead cells (Shapiro, 1988).”
Background
High-Resolution Analysis of the Peptidoglycan Composition in Streptomyces coelicolor
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“It is now known that many bacteria are also inherently social (32).”
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“In such a perspective, the bacterial colony behaves much like a multicellular organism or a social community [25].”
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“…as disingenuously ‘‘holistic’’ James Shapiro’s insistence that bacteria are ‘‘multicellular organisms’’ whose characteristic colony formations and collective behavior are scrutinized just as mercilessly by natural selection as is, say, the regulation of the lac operon in E. coli (Shapiro 1988).”
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Pattern and control in bacterial colony development.
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“Shapiro (1988) pointed out that our tendency to view bacteria as simple unicellular organisms is likely to be inaccurate, arising from biases of medical bacteriological research, and that in fact bacteria typically function in large ensembles analogous to multi-cellular organisms.”
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“The rotation state is often observed as the onset of the formation of a fruiting body which are formed by, among others, the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum [21] and Myxobacteria [26].”
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Genomic rearrangements in the flagellin genes of Proteus mirabilis
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“These social traits of microbes reflect intercellular cooperation and coordination, which are the hallmarks of multicellularity (Shapiro, 1988; Lyons & Kolter, 2015).”
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Confocal Raman Microspectroscopy
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“5 billion years ago (Shapiro 1988; Shapiro and Dworkin 1997; Margulis 1993; Bloom 1997).”
Background
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“Shapiro (1988) comments that the Myxococcus xanthus bacteria constructs spherical colonies containing millionsofindividuals,surroundingacommontargetinorder to feed.”
Background
Evolutionary epistemology: Reviewing and reviving with new data the research programme for distributed biological intelligence
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“Individual bacterial cells use sophisticated forms of ommunication including quorum-sensing, chemotactic signaling, nd plasmid exchange (Shapiro, 1988; Bassler, 2002), which in turn llow formation of highly organized colonies, that possess environental adaptability (Ben-Jacob, 1998).”
BackgroundInfluential
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Enthalpy of interaction between coaggregating and non-coaggregating oral bacterial pairs—a microcalorimetric study
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Motility, mixing, and multicellularity
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“This phase shares some properties with swarming populations [46, 47].”
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Fisher equation with turbulence in one dimension
Benzi, R., & Nelson, D. R. (2009) · Physica D Nonlinear Phenomena · doi:10.1016/j.physd.2009.07.015 · Cited by 23
“In the last few years, a number of theoretical and experimental studies [3], [4], [5], [6], [7] have been performed to understand the spreading and extinction of a population in an inhomogeneous environment.”
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“Examples of collective bacterial phenotypes are accumulating in the literature, making it easier to consider prokaryotic regulatory phenomena in a multicellular context (Shapiro and Dworkin, 1997; Shapiro, 1998).”
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“Bacteria within colonies can display sophisticated modes of multicellular coordination that can be useful in the environment where bacteria predominantly grow as biofilms, chains, mats, and colonies [5, 24 ].”
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“These findings suggest that quantitative factors that influence gene expression, similar to those previously found in Escherichia coli (14), are at play within B.”
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“…can display a variety of shapes, most commonly they form filamentous aggregates, and, in the case of heterocysts-forming cyanobacteria, they grow uniseriate, that is as unidirectional filaments in one plane (Shapiro 1988; Flores and Herrero 2010; Claessen et al. 2014; Schirrmeister et al. 2015).”
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“Nevertheless, the possible influence of polymers on another fundamental characteristic of bacterial life—spatial proliferation in a multicellular colony ( 14 , 15 )—remains unknown.”
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Authors: Shapiro, J. A.
Corresponding author: Shapiro, James A.
ORCID: Shapiro, James A.
Venue: Scientific American
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published: 1988-06
Volume: 258
Issue: 6
Pages: 82-89
ISSN: 0036-8733 (ISSN-L)
DOI: 10.1038/scientificamerican0688-82
OpenAlex: W2037294630
Cited by: 524
References: 0
Citations by year: 2026: 3 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 11 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 11 · 2016: 18 · 2015: 17 · 2014: 20 · 2013: 13 · 2012: 21
FWCI: 2.37
Type: journal article
Language: en
Open access: closed
Locations: Scientific American (publishedVersion)
Topics: Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Bacterial biofilms and quorum sensing
Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Bacterial Genetics and Biotechnology
Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology
Keywords: bacteria, multicellularity, bacterial aggregation, bacterial social behavior, biofilm

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