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Updated: Aug 14, 2026

Monitoring Intraspecies Competition in a Bacterial Cell Population by Cocultivation of Fluorescently Labelled Strains
Published on: January 18, 2014
Correlation between diverse cyclic lipopeptides production and regulation of growth and substrate utilization by
Ashis K Mukherjee1, Kishore Das
1ONGC Centre for Petroleum Biotechnology, Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Tezpur University, Tezpur 784 028, India. akm@tezu.ernet.in
Abstract:
The two Bacillus subtilis strains (DM-03 and DM-04) were isolated from two extremely different habitats; one from the traditional fermented food and another one from a petroleum contaminated soil sample. These strains produced quantitatively and qualitatively different cyclic lipopeptides isoforms under laboratory culture conditions. MALDI-TOF mass spectral analysis revealed that lipopeptide profile varied according to the producing B. subtilis strains; iturins and surfactins isoforms were pre-dominant cyclic lipopeptides produced by B. subtilis DM-03 and DM-04 strains, respectively. A comparative study showed that these strains possessed distinct preferences for the carbon and nitrogen substrates, temperature and pH for optimal growth and biosurfactant production. Our study documented that the cyclic lipopeptide isoforms produced by the respective strains played an important role in the utilization of available hydrophobic substrate(s) from their natural habitats and conferred some kind of competitive advantage to the producing B. subtilis strains in their parent ecological niche.
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