Growing away from monocultures – interdependent growth conditions for studying antibacterial and antiphage systems.

Growing away from monocultures - interdependent growth conditions for studying antibacterial and antiphage systems If you google the word "microbiologist", you will likely come upon pictures of scientists scrutinizing bacterial colonies on an agar plate or examining the contents of Erlenmeyer flasks growing I Escherichia coli i to a high cell density. Inter-microbial interactions have also gained attention in the field of infection biology, which is growing from a pure focus on microbe-host interactions towards microbe-microbe-host or phage-microbe-host "ménage-à-trois" scenarios. As with antibiotic resistance, bacteria can horizontally acquire genes that allow them to resist contact-dependent or independent intoxication by other bacteria or phage. [Extracted from the article]