TraitMech

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cellular buoyancy

traitmech:000528 · CLASS · PROPOSED

A physiology trait in which intracellular gas vesicles reduce a microbial cell's effective density enough to provide buoyancy and vertical positioning in the water column.

Trait evidence (3)

  • DOI:10.1186/s13036-024-00426-3
    can provide buoyancy for them to move up and down the water to obtain nutrients

    Feng et al. review gas-vesicle physical properties that provide buoyancy for photosynthetic bacteria and halophilic archaea.

  • DOI:10.1186/s13036-024-00426-3
    give them the buoyancy to move upward so that they can get enough light for photosynthesis

    Feng et al. describe gas vesicles giving photosynthetic bacteria buoyancy to move upward toward sufficient light.

  • DOI:10.3390/life12091455
    Approximately 3–10% of the cell volume must be occupied by gas vesicles to provide buoyancy

    Pfeifer reviews gas-vesicle proteins and summarizes the fraction of cell volume that must contain gas vesicles to confer buoyancy.

Gas vesicles confer cellular buoyancy

Evidence-backed causal sketch linking a proteinaceous gas-filled organelle to cellular buoyancy.

NONMECHANISTIC · The graph records the organelle-scale physical gas-vesicle branch and leaves taxon-specific Gvp protein assembly to the gas-vesicle morphology record. It does not assert that all planktonic depth regulation is gas-vesicle mediated.

Gas vesicles confer cellular buoyancy Interactive directed graph showing evidence-backed causal relationships for cellular buoyancy.

Edge evidence

  • gas vesicle shell part of gas vesicle biolink:part_of

    The protein shell encloses the internal gas volume as part of the gas vesicle.

    • DOI:10.1186/s13036-024-00426-3 The gas vesicle (GV) is like a hollow nanoparticle consisting of an internal gas and a protein shell Feng et al. describe the gas vesicle as an internal gas compartment bounded by a protein shell.
  • gas vesicle confers cellular buoyancy METPO:2007700

    Gas-filled vesicles lower effective cellular density and provide buoyancy.

    • DOI:10.1186/s13036-024-00426-3 can provide buoyancy for them to move up and down the water to obtain nutrients Feng et al. review gas-vesicle physical properties that provide buoyancy for photosynthetic bacteria and halophilic archaea.
    • DOI:10.1186/s13036-024-00426-3 give them the buoyancy to move upward so that they can get enough light for photosynthesis Feng et al. describe gas vesicles giving photosynthetic bacteria buoyancy to move upward toward sufficient light.

Provenance

Identifier source
TraitMech local identifier
Definition source
DOI:10.1186/s13036-024-00426-3

Parent traits (1)

Synonyms (1)

  • buoyancy RELATED_SYNONYM · DOI:10.1186/s13036-024-00426-3

kg-microbe context

No kg-microbe node embedding matched this record in the 2026-04-25 deepwalk.

Canonical examples (1)

Organisms cited as exemplars of this trait. Taxon ids are NCBITaxon and link out to the NCBI record.

Discussions and Knowledge Gaps (1)

Open questions attached to this trait. Seeded by just knowledge-gap-scan and curated; see the corpus-wide index.

Resolve exact external ontology xrefs for gas-vesicle-mediated cellular buoyancy.

CURATION TODO OPEN cellular-buoyancy-xref-gap · raised by codex · 2026-10-01

Not yet attached to a section of this record — a curator sets attaches_to (e.g. causal_graphs#some_edge) so the gap shows beside the mechanism it concerns.

No exact active local METPO class was accepted for the organism-level cellular-buoyancy physiology trait. The only buoyancy hit in the local METPO snapshot is obsolete buoyancy structure, and GO:0031411 denotes the gas vesicle organelle rather than the gas-vesicle-conferred physiological disposition.

Curation history

  1. · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex

    Minted cellular buoyancy as a DOI-backed PHYSIOLOGY TraitRecord after an ignored-and-hidden duplicate review found no exact same-scope TraitMech, METPO, history, or prior proposal record; the replacement placeholder is reserved in proposals/metpo_traitmech_v405.