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Bacterial communities as capitalist economies

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Tracking the behaviour of bacteria as they group together on a surface reveals a 'rich-get-richer' mechanism in which polysaccharide deposition and cellular location amplify in a positive feedback loop. See Letter p.388

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Figure 1: A positive feed-forward circuit steers biofilm formation.

Notes

  1. *This article and the paper under discussion1 were published online on 8 May 2013.

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  1. Ute Römling is in the Department of Microbiology, Cell and Tumor Biology, Karolinska Institutet, 171 77 Stockholm, Sweden.,

    Ute Römling

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  1. Ute Römling
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Correspondence to Ute Römling.

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Römling, U. Bacterial communities as capitalist economies. Nature 497, 321–322 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12103

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