Clonal communities of single celled organisms, such as bacterial or fungal colonies and biofilms, are spatially structured, with subdomains of cells experiencing differing environmental conditions. In the development of such communities, cell specialization is not only important to respond and adapt to the local environment but has the potential to increase the fitness of the clonal community through division of labor. Here, we examine colony development in a yeast strain (F13) that produces colonies with a highly structured "ruffled" phenotype in the colony periphery and an unstructured "smooth" phenotype in the colony center.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSymmetry breaking has been shown to reveal interesting phenomena in physical systems. A notable example is the fundamental work of Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach [Stern and Zerlach, Z. Physik9, 349 (1922)10.
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