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Recruitment via settlement of pelagic larvae is critical for the persistence of benthic marine populations. For many benthic invertebrates, larval settlement occurs in response to surface microbial films. Larvae of the serpulid polychaete Hydroides elegans can be induced to settle by single bacterial species. Until now, only Pseudoalteromonas luteoviolacea had been subjected to detailed genetic and mechanistic studies. To determine if the complex structures, termed tailocins, derived from phage-tail gene assemblies and hypothesized to be the settlement cue in P. luteoviolacea were present in all inductive bacteria, genomic comparisons with inductive strains of Cellulophaga lytica, Bacillus aquimaris and Staphylococcus warneri were undertaken. They revealed that the gene assemblies for tailocins are lacking in these other bacteria. Negatively stained TEM images confirmed the absence of tailocins and revealed instead large numbers of extracellular vesicles in settlement-inductive fractions from all three bacteria. TEM imaging confirmed for C. lytica that the vesicles are budded from cell surfaces in a manner consistent with the production of outer membrane vesicles. Finding multiple bacteria settlement cues highlights the importance of further studies into the role of bacterial extracellular vesicles in eliciting settlement and metamorphosis of benthic marine larvae.
Freckelton et al. (Tue,) studied this question.