Microfluidic Island Biogeography — Jam and Conquer

Date

Dec 12, 2022

Time

4:30 PM - 5:30 PM

Speaker

Prof. Oskar Hallatschek

Affiliation

University of Leipzig

Series

MPI-PKS Kolloquium

Language

en

Main Topic

Physik

Other Topics

Physik

Description

Microbes often colonize spatially-constrained habitats, such as pores in the skin or crypts in the colon. The resulting micro-communities can be very stable and contribute to the long-term function of our microbiomes. Due to a lack of spatio-temporal observations, it is however unclear how these communities and their ecological functions arise. Using microfluidic devices to systematically vary ecological correlation lengths, we uncover sharp transitions between different colonization states with different evolutionary properties. Our results show that density-dependent passive diffusion can drive reproducing populations to a jamming threshold, which entails supreme resilience against invaders at the cost of a total loss of mixing and intra-species competition. These results elucidate how cell proliferation can drive unique non-equilibrium phase transitions (different from MIPS). The emerging sensitivity to scale, foreshadowed in the field of island biogeography, underscores the need to control for scale in microbial eco-evolutionary experiments.

Last modified: Dec 12, 2022, 7:35:46 AM