Spatio-temporal microbial evolution dynamics
In natural microbial communities, antagonistic interactions among bacterial species, or between bacteria and phages, are important drivers of community evolution and ecological dynamics. These natural environments often involve spatial structure, which could be a key factor for evolutionary processes as well as for expansion dynamics into new spaces, yet it is often neglected in microbial community experimentation and simulations. In this project, we first studied evolution of antibiotic producers in microdroplets, effectively forming small, distinct environments where direct competition with resistant bacteria is excluded and, therefore, selection for producers can occur. In the second part, we modeled bacteria-phage interactions in an expanding bacterial wave in space. We show how phage-resistant bacteria can protect sensitive bacteria through an indirect slowdown of phage migration in a competition scenario and how phages could potentially overcome this protection mechanism. Together, these studies help shed light on the complex spatio-temporal dynamics of antagonistically interacting microbial species.
