title: Anomalous spatial redistribution of competing bacteria under starvation conditions.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. glambert@princeton.edu
authors.forename: Guillaume
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Lambert
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Liao
authors.forename: Saurabh
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Vyawahare
authors.forename: Robert H
authors.initials: RH
authors.lastname: Austin
mesh_terms: D003470:Culture Media / Q000737:chemistry; D004926:Escherichia coli / Q000254:growth & development* / Q000378:metabolism*; D056265:Microbial Interactions; D010641:Phenotype; D013312:Stress, Physiological
chemical_list: D003470:Culture Media