All Politics is Local: Length Scales of the Coexistence of Competing Bacterial Strains In a Microhabitat Landscape

From Q-bio

One of the major problems in ecology is predicting the stable coexistence of competing populations in shared, topologically complex spaces under stress (Durrett and Levin 1994, Durrett1997). We report on the use of unstirred nanofabricated habitat landscapes to show that wild-type and GASP mutant strains of E. coli form discrete clusters which coexist even at microscopic scales in unstirred micro-environments. We have developed a simple lattice model of interacting individual bacteria which can reproduce many of the surprising aspects of this local spatial segregation