Special seminar - Sander Tans: Motility in bacterial coexistence
- Date: Nov 14, 2019
- Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Sander Tans from the Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF), Netherlands
- Location: MPI Plön
- Room: Lecture hall
- Host: Paul Rainey
Abstract:
My group is interested in
developing new assays to
study the temporal dynamics of biological systems, ranging from
protein folding
to evolution. In this talk, I will focus on a project that we
completed
recently on the role of bacterial motility in coexistence.
Specifically, we
found that motility-driven competition produces strong negative
frequency-dependent selection, in which each strain outcompetes
the other when
low in frequency. This inversion of competitive hierarchy is
caused by active spatial
segregation and exclusion within the colonized nutrient patch.
It is lost for
weak growth-migration trade-offs and a lack of virgin space, but
is
surprisingly robust to initial cell ratio, density, and
chemotactic ability, and
is observed for laboratory strains as well as for wild strains
isolated from
single hosts. The findings indicate that motility differences
and growth
trade-offs can promote diversity, and suggest roles for motility
in collective
expulsion-containment strategies and niche-formation. If time
allows, I will
also present work on the causes of epistasis and genetic
constraint in gene
regulatory networks.