Coexistence of phage and bacteria on the boundary of self-organized refuges

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Abstract

Bacteriophage are voracious predators of bacteria and a major determinant in shaping bacterial life strategies. Many phage species are virulent, meaning that infection leads to certain death of the host and immediate release of a large batch of phage progeny. Despite this apparent voraciousness, bacteria have stably coexisted with virulent phages for eons. Here, using individual-based stochastic spatial models, we study the conditions for achieving coexistence on the edge between two habitats, one of which is a bacterial refuge with conditions hostile to phage whereas the other is phage friendly. We show how bacterial density-dependent, or quorum-sensing, mechanisms such as the formation of biofilm can produce such refuges and edges in a self-organized manner. Coexistence on these edges exhibits the following properties, all of which are observed in real phage-bacteria ecosystems but difficult to achieve together in nonspatial ecosystem models: (i) highly efficient virulent phage with relatively long lifetimes, high infection rates and large burst sizes; (ii ) large, stable, and high-density populations of phage and bacteria; (iii ) a fast turnover of both phage and bacteria; and (iv) stability over evolutionary timescales despite imbalances in the rates of phage vs. bacterial evolution.

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Heilmann, S., Sneppen, K., & Krishna, S. (2012). Coexistence of phage and bacteria on the boundary of self-organized refuges. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(31), 12828–12833. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1200771109

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