RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Sustainability of spatially distributed bacteria-phage systems
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 495671
DO 10.1101/495671
A1 Rasmus Skytte Eriksen
A1 Namiko Mitarai
A1 Kim Sneppen
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/13/495671.abstract
AB Virulent phages can expose their bacterial hosts to devastating epidemics, in principle leading to a complete elimination of their hosts. Although experiments indeed confirm large reduction of susceptible bacteria, there are no reports of complete extinctions. We here address this phenomenon from the perspective of spatial organization of bacteria and how this can influence the final survival of them. By modeling the transient dynamics of bacteria and phages when they are introduced into an environment with finite resources, we quantify how time-delayed lysis, the spatial separation of initial bacterial positions, and the self-protection of bacteria growing in spherical colonies favor bacterial survival. This suggests that spatial structures on the millimeter and sub-millimeter scale plays an important role in maintaining microbial diversity.Author summary For virulent phage that invade a bacterial population, the mass-action kinetics predict extinction for a wide range of infection parameters. This is not found in experiments, where sensitive bacteria repeatedly are seen to survive the first epidemics of phage attack. To explain the transient survival of infected bacterial populations we develop a combination of local mass-action kinetics with lattice models. This model includes population dynamics, a latency time between phage infection and cell lysis, spatial separation with percolation of phages as well as colony level protection on the sub-millimeter scale. Our model is validated against recently published data on infected Escherichia Coli colonies.