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Changes in cell surface properties of Pseudomonas fluorescens by adaptation to NaCl induced hypertonic stress
Abd Alaziz Abu Quba1, Marc-Oliver Goebel2, Mariam Karagulyan3
1Institute of Environmental Sciences, Rheinland-pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslauter-Landau, RPTU in Landau, Fortstrasse 7, 76829 Landau, Germany.
Abstract:
Determination of the effect of water stress on the surface properties of bacteria is crucial to study bacterial induced soil water repellency. Changes in the environmental conditions may affect several properties of bacteria such as the cell hydrophobicity and morphology. Here, we study the influence of adaptation to hypertonic stress on cell wettability, shape, adhesion, and surface chemical composition of Pseudomonas fluorescens. From this we aim to discover possible relations between the changes in wettability of bacterial films studied by contact angle and single cells studied by atomic and chemical force microscopy (AFM, CFM), which is still lacking. We show that by stress the adhesion forces of the cell surfaces towards hydrophobic functionalized probes increase while they decrease towards hydrophilic functionalized tips. This is consistent with the contact angle results. Further, cell size shrunk and protein content increased upon stress. The results suggest two possible mechanisms: Cell shrinkage is accompanied by the release of outer membrane vesicles by which the protein to lipid ratio increases. The higher protein content increases the rigidity and the number of hydrophobic nano-domains per surface area.
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