Genetic control of bacterial adhesion

Abstract

Adhesive substances represent a solution to the problem of colonizing varied surfaces in the bacterial habitat. A given species may have genetic information for a large repertoire of adhesive substances, and the outcome of an encounter between a population of these bacteria and a particular surface may depend on how the bacteria regulate the expression of the adhesive substances which they encode. Synthesis of adhesive substances appears to be regulated to match the demands of the environmental circumstances, and we discuss several genetic strategies which bacteria could use to control expression of these functions.

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