Scientists decipher how two bacterial species cooperate to avoid being eaten

Back in 2021, Pierre Stallforth and his team at the Leibniz-Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology (Leibniz-HKI) showed that bacteria of the genera Pseudomonas and Paenibacillus join forces to protect themselves from their predator, an amoeba. Now, a team led by Pierre Stallforth, Ute Hellmich, and Markus Lakemeyer has been able to show exactly how this defense mechanism works. The study was conducted by the Cluster of Excellence Balance of the Microverse at the University of Jena and has just been published in the journal Journal of the American Chemical Society.