Patchiness in a microhabitat chip affects evolutionary dynamics of bacterial cooperation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Localized interactions are predicted to favour the evolution of cooperation amongst individuals within a population. One important factor that can localize interactions is habitat patchiness. We hypothesize that habitats with greater patchiness (greater edge-to-area ratio) can facilitate the maintenance of cooperation. This outcome is believed to be particularly relevant in pathogenic microbes that can inhabit patchy habitats such as the human respiratory tract. To test this hypothesis in a simple but spatially controlled setting, we designed a transparent microhabitat chip (MHC) with multiple patchiness treatments at the 100 micron scale. The MHC is a closed system that sustains bacterial replication and survival for up to 18 hours, and allows spatial patterns and eco-evolutionary dynamics to be observed undisturbed. Using the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, we tracked the growth of wild-type cooperators, which produce the public good pyoverdin, in competition with mutant defectors or cheaters that use, but do not produce, pyoverdin. We found that while defectors on average outperformed cooperators in all habitats, habitat patchiness significantly alleviated the ecological pressure against cooperation due to defection, leading to coexistence. Our results confirmed that habitat-level spatial heterogeneity can be important for cooperation. The MHC enables novel experiments, allows multiple parameters to be precisely varied and studied simultaneously, and will help uncover dynamical features of spatial ecology and the evolution of pathogens.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".