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Supplementary material from "Habitat fragmentation enhances microbial collective defence"

Posted on 2025-02-04 - 11:06
Microbes often inhabit complex, spatially partitioned geometries such as host tissue or soil, but the effects of habitat fragmentation on microbial ecology and infection dynamics are poorly understood. Here we investigate how habitat fragmentation impacts a prevalent microbial collective defence mechanism: enzymatic degradation of an environmental toxin. Using a theoretical model, we predict that habitat fragmentation can strongly enhance the collective benefits of enzymatic toxin degradation. For the example of β-lactamase producing bacteria that mount a collective defence by degrading a β-lactam antibiotic, we find that realistic levels of habitat fragmentation can allow a population to survive antibiotic doses that would far exceed those required to kill a non-fragmented population. This "habitat-fragmentation rescue" is a stochastic effect that originates from variation in bacterial density among different subpopulations and demographic noise. We also study the contrasting case of collective enzymatic foraging, where enzyme activity releases nutrient from the environment; here we find that increasing habitat fragmentation decreases the lag time for population growth but does not change the ecological outcome. Taken together, this work predicts that stochastic effects arising from habitat fragmentation can greatly enhance the effectiveness of microbial collective defence via enzymatic toxin degradation.

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Journal of the Royal Society Interface

AUTHORS (4)

Nia Verdon
Ofelia Popescu
Simon Titmuss
Rosalind Allen

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