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An irregular fiord-like outline of a S. marcescens colony expanding on a hard agar medium was shown to be fractal which promised an extremely long array of outermost cells. For the analysis of such spreading growth, mutants defective in production of surface active exolipids (serrawettin W1 and W3) and flagella-less mutants were isolated. The fractal spreading growth was found to be correlated with serrawettin production. Furthermore, serrawettin-less mutants demonstrated spreading growth when purified serrawettin W1 or W3 were supplied exogenously.
Matsuyama et al. (Sun,) studied this question.