By controlling nutrient cycling and biomass production at the base of the food web, interactions between phytoplankton and bacteria represent a fundamental ecological relationship in aquatic environments. Although typically studied over large spatiotemporal scales, emerging evidence indicates that this relationship is often governed by microscale interactions played out within the region immediately surrounding individual phytoplankton cells. This microenvironment, known as the phycosphere, is the planktonic analogue of the rhizosphere in plants. The exchange of metabolites and infochemicals at this interface governs phytoplankton-bacteria relationships, which span mutualism, commensalism, antagonism, parasitism and competition. The importance of the phycosphere has been postulated for four decades, yet only recently have new technological and conceptual frameworks made it possible to start teasing apart the complex nature of this unique microbial habitat. It has subsequently become apparent that the chemical exchanges and ecological interactions between phytoplankton and bacteria are far more sophisticated than previously thought and often require close proximity of the two partners, which is facilitated by bacterial colonization of the phycosphere. It is also becoming increasingly clear that while interactions taking place within the phycosphere occur at the scale of individual microorganisms, they exert an ecosystem-scale influence on fundamental processes including nutrient provision and regeneration, primary production, toxin biosynthesis and biogeochemical cycling. Here we review the fundamental physical, chemical and ecological features of the phycosphere, with the goal of delivering a fresh perspective on the nature and importance of phytoplankton-bacteria interactions in aquatic ecosystems.

Extensive genomic diversity within coexisting members of a microbial species has been revealed through selected cultured isolates and metagenomic assemblies. Yet, the cell-by-cell genomic composition of wild uncultured populations of co-occurring cells is largely unknown. In this work, we applied large-scale single-cell genomics to study populations of the globally abundant marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus. We show that they are composed of hundreds of subpopulations with distinct "genomic backbones," each backbone consisting of a different set of core gene alleles linked to a small distinctive set of flexible genes. These subpopulations are estimated to have diverged at least a few million years ago, suggesting ancient, stable niche partitioning. Such a large set of coexisting subpopulations may be a general feature of free-living bacterial species with huge populations in highly mixed habitats.

Marine bacteria influence Earth's environmental dynamics in fundamental ways by controlling the biogeochemistry and productivity of the oceans. These large-scale consequences result from the combined effect of countless interactions occurring at the level of the individual cells. At these small scales, the ocean is surprisingly heterogeneous, and microbes experience an environment of pervasive and dynamic chemical and physical gradients. Many species actively exploit this heterogeneity, while others rely on gradient-independent adaptations. This is an exciting time to explore this frontier of oceanography, but understanding microbial behavior and competition in the context of the water column's microarchitecture calls for new ecological frameworks, such as a microbial optimal foraging theory, to determine the relevant trade-offs and global consequences of microbial life in a sea of gradients.

Bacteria often live in dynamic fluid environments 1-3 and flow can a ect fundamental microbial processes such as nutrient uptake 1,4 and infection 5 . However, little is known about the consequences of the forces and torques associated with fluid flow on bacteria. Through microfluidic experiments, we show that fluid shear produces strong spatial heterogeneity in suspensions of motile bacteria, characterized by up to 70% cell depletion from low-shear regions due to 'trapping' in high-shear regions. Two mathematical models and a scaling analysis accurately capture these observations, including the maximal depletion at mean shear rates of 2.5-10 s −1 , and reveal that trapping by shear originates from the competition between the cell alignment with the flow and the stochasticity in the swimming orientation. We show that this shear-induced trapping directly impacts widespread bacterial behaviours, by hampering chemotaxis and promoting surface attachment. These results suggest that the hydrodynamic environment may directly a ect bacterial fitness and should be carefully considered in the study of microbial processes.We investigated the effect of flow on motile bacteria by tracking them in precisely controlled laminar flows generated in a microfluidic channel (Fig. 1a). To ensure that the dominant velocity gradients occurred in the horizontal observation plane, at the channel mid-depth, we used a microchannel with aspect ratio H /W > 1 (height H = 750 µm; width W = 425 µm). In that plane, the velocity profile, u(y) = U [1 − 4(y/W ) 2 ], where U is the flow velocity at the channel centreline, is parabolic, and, thus, the shear rate S(y) = du/dy = −8yU /W 2 varies linearly with distance y across the channel and is zero at the centreline (Fig. 1b). In this flow, smooth-swimming Bacillus subtilis bacteria swam unperturbed in straight paths (Fig. 1c) when near the centre of the channel, where the local shear rate was small. Conversely, in high-shear-rate regions, trajectories exhibited frequent loops resulting from rotation of the swimming bacteria by the hydrodynamic torque imparted by the local shear (Fig. 1d). The opposite handedness of the loops on either side of the channel centreline reflects the opposite sign of the shear rate (Fig. 1c,d and Supplementary Movie 1). As shown below, these looping trajectories resulted in bacteria becoming trapped in the high-shear region of the channel.At the population scale, this trapping effect resulted in a marked depletion of cells from the central, low-shear region of the flow, and consequently, in an accumulation in the flanking regions of higher shear. When the flow was impulsively started from rest, the initially uniform distribution of cells over the imaging region across the channel width (Fig. 1e) rapidly (5-10 s) evolved into a distribution characterized by considerably fewer cells in the central part of the channel (Fig. 1f-h). The magnitude of the depletion was severe, with local cell concentrations dropping by 70% (Fig. 1h). The absence of depletion in control experime...