title: Slow and steady wins the race: a bacterial exploitative competition strategy in fluctuating environments.
abstract: One promising frontier for synthetic biology is the development of synthetic ecologies, whereby interacting species form an additional layer of connectivity for engineered gene circuits. Toward this goal, an important step is to understand different types of bacterial interactions in natural settings, among which competition is the most prevalent. By constructing a two-species population dynamics model, here, we mimicked bacterial growth in nature with resource-limited fluctuating environments and searched for optimal strategies for bacterial exploitative competition. In a simple game with two strategy options (constant or susceptible growth), we found that the species playing the constant growth strategy always outplays or is evenly matched with its competitor, suggesting that constant growth is a "no-loss" good bet. We also showed that adoption of sophisticated strategies enables a species to maximize its fitness when its competitor grows susceptibly. The pursuit of fitness maximization is, however, associated with potential loss if both species are capable of strategy adjustment, indicating an intrinsic risk-return trade-off. These findings offer new insights into bacterial competition and may also facilitate the engineering of microbial consortia for synthetic biology applications.
authors.affiliation: †Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61801, United States.|‡Department of Physics, Huzhou Teachers College, Huzhou 313000, China.
authors.forename: Junwen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mao
authors.affiliation: §Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61801, United States.
authors.forename: Andrew E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Blanchard
authors.affiliation: †Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61801, United States.|§Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61801, United States.|∥Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61801, United States.
authors.forename: Ting
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lu
mesh_terms: D018407:Bacterial Physiological Phenomena; D059013:Microbial Consortia / Q000502:physiology*; D056265:Microbial Interactions / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological
keywords: bacterial exploitative competition; fluctuating environments; limited resources; risk and return; strategic games