Surface-associated growth

In natural ecosystems, microbial activity is often associated with the presence of a surface, particularly in low-nutrient environments. The chemostat allows the study of such low-nutrient environments together with the precise control of other growth parameters. By using this system, enrichment cultures with inocula from two different river sources have been made. A more diverse community attached itself to surfaces placed in the chemostat when the cultures were carbon-limited than when the limiting nutrient was nitrogen. Further studies on a pseudomonad isolated from the carbon-limited enrichment cultures have shown that surface-associated organisms grow at approximately twice the rate of the same organism in the free surrounding medium. A hypothesis to explain this phenomenon based on the chemiosmotic theory is discussed.