Hol Felix J H, Rotem Or, Jurkevitch Edouard, Dekker Cees, Koster Daniel A
Department of Bionanoscience, Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Delft University of Technology, Lorentzweg 1, 2628 CJ Delft, The Netherlands.
Department of Agroecology and Plant Health, The Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
Proc Biol Sci. 2016 Feb 10;283(1824). doi: 10.1098/rspb.2015.2154.
Soil is a microenvironment with a fragmented (patchy) spatial structure in which many bacterial species interact. Here, we explore the interaction between the predatory bacterium Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus and its prey Escherichia coli in microfabricated landscapes. We ask how fragmentation influences the prey dynamics at the microscale and compare two landscape geometries: a patchy landscape and a continuous landscape. By following the dynamics of prey populations with high spatial and temporal resolution for many generations, we found that the variation in predation rates was twice as large in the patchy landscape and the dynamics was correlated over shorter length scales. We also found that while the prey population in the continuous landscape was almost entirely driven to extinction, a significant part of the prey population in the fragmented landscape persisted over time. We observed significant surface-associated growth, especially in the fragmented landscape and we surmise that this sub-population is more resistant to predation. Our results thus show that microscale fragmentation can significantly influence bacterial interactions.
土壤是一个具有碎片化（斑块状）空间结构的微环境，其中许多细菌物种相互作用。在这里，我们探索了捕食性细菌食菌蛭弧菌与其猎物大肠杆菌在微制造景观中的相互作用。我们研究碎片化如何在微观尺度上影响猎物动态，并比较两种景观几何形状：斑块状景观和连续景观。通过以高时空分辨率跟踪多代猎物种群的动态，我们发现斑块状景观中捕食率的变化是连续景观中的两倍，并且动态在较短的长度尺度上具有相关性。我们还发现，虽然连续景观中的猎物种群几乎完全灭绝，但碎片化景观中的很大一部分猎物种群随时间持续存在。我们观察到显著的表面相关生长，尤其是在碎片化景观中，并且我们推测这个亚种群对捕食更具抵抗力。因此，我们的结果表明微观尺度的碎片化可以显著影响细菌相互作用。
