Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 105, Issue 51, Pages 20269-20273Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0810792105
Keywords
biophysics; competition; ecology; microbiology
Categories
Funding
- Delft University of Technology Start-up funds
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research [FA9550-05-01-0365]
- National Institutes of Health [HG01506]
- National Science Foundation Nanobiology Technology Center [BSCECS9876771]
- Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility [ECS-9731293]
- Department of Defense NDSEG fellowship program
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Defense Advanced Research Planning Agency
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Competing populations in shared spaces with nonrenewable resources do not necessarily wage a battle for dominance at the cost of extinction of the less-fit strain if there are fitness advantages to the presence of the other strain. We report on the use of nano-fabricated habitat landscapes to study the population dynamics of competing wild type and a growth advantage in stationary phase (GASP) mutant strains of Escherichia coli in a sealed and heterogeneous nutrient environment. Although GASP mutants are competitors with wild-type bacteria, we find that the 2 strains cooperate to maximize fitness (long-term total productivity) via spatial segregation: despite their very close genomic kinship, wild-type populations associate with wild-type populations and GASP populations with GASP populations. Thus, wild-type and GASP strains avoid each other locally, yet fitness is enhanced for both strains globally. This computation of fitness enhancement emerges from the local interaction among cells but maximizes global densities. At present we do not understand how fluctuations in both spatial and temporal dimensions lead to the emergent computation and how multilevel aggregates produce this collective adaptation.
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