Journal
JOURNAL OF BACTERIOLOGY
Volume 193, Issue 8, Pages 1878-1883Publisher
AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY
DOI: 10.1128/JB.01430-10
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Funding
- National Science Foundation [ECS-0335765, 0750323]
- Department of Defense
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- National Cancer Institute [U54CA143803]
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Bacterial cells evolved under prolonged stress often have a growth advantage in stationary phase (GASP); we expect GASP cells to maintain a proliferative state and dominate wild-type cells during starvation, especially when nutrients are limited and the medium has been conditioned. However, when we compete GASP mutants against wild-type cells in a chain of microfluidic microhabitat patches (MHPs) with alternating nutrient-rich and nutrient-limited regions, we observe the reverse effect: wild-type cells achieve maximum relative density under nutrient-limited conditions, while GASP cells dominate nutrient-rich regions. We explain this surprising observation in terms of ideal free distributions, where we show that wild-type cells maximize their fitness at high cell density by redistributing themselves to sparsely populated MHPs. At the microscopic level, we describe how biofilm formation also contributes to the population redistribution. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for social interactions of more complex organisms.
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