Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 117, Issue 9, Pages 4693-4700Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1917789117
Keywords
bacterial swarming; flagellar motility; antibiotic tolerance; adaptive stress response; collective motion
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Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [NSFC 21473152]
- Research Grants Council of Hong Kong Special Administration Region
- General Research Fund [14322316]
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Population expansion in space, or range expansion, is widespread in nature and in clinical settings. Space competition among heterogeneous subpopulations during range expansion is essential to population ecology, and it may involve the interplay of multiple factors, primarily growth and motility of individuals. Structured microbial communities provide model systems to study space competition during range expansion. Here we use bacterial swarms to investigate how single-cell motility contributes to space competition among heterogeneous bacterial populations during range expansion. Our results revealed that motility heterogeneity can promote the spatial segregation of subpopulations via a dynamic motility selection process. The dynamic motility selection is enabled by speed-dependent persistence time bias of single-cell motion, which presumably arises from physical interaction between cells in a densely packed swarm. We further showed that the dynamic motility selection may contribute to collective drug tolerance of swarming colonies by segregating subpopulations with transient drug tolerance to the colony edge. Our results illustrate that motility heterogeneity, or motility fitness, can play a greater role than growth rate fitness in determining the short-term spatial structure of expanding populations.
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