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PHYSICAL SCIENCES / BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES / EVOLUTION
Bacterial metapopulations in nanofabricated landscapes

Juan E. Keymer, Peter Galajda, Cecilia Muldoon, Sungsu Park, and Robert H. Austin

Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1014

Contributed by Robert H. Austin, September 17, 2006

We have constructed a linear array of coupled, microscale patches of habitat. When bacteria are inoculated into this habitat landscape, a metapopulation emerges. Local bacterial populations in each patch coexist and weakly couple with neighbor populations in nearby patches. These spatially distributed bacterial populations interact through local extinction and colonization processes. We have further built heterogeneous habitat landscapes to study the adaptive dynamics of the bacterial metapopulations. By patterning habitat differences across the landscape, our device physically implements an adaptive landscape. In landscapes with higher niche diversity, we observe rapid adaptation to large-scale, low-quality (high-stress) areas. Our results illustrate the potential lying at the interface between nanoscale biophysics and landscape evolutionary ecology.

biophysics | microbiology | landscape ecology | metapopulation biology

Author contributions: J.E.K. and P.G. contributed equally to this work; J.E.K., P.G., C.M., S.P., and R.H.A. designed research; J.E.K., P.G., C.M., S.P., and R.H.A. performed research; J.E.K. and P.G. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; J.E.K., P.G., C.M., and R.H.A. analyzed data; and J.E.K., P.G., and R.H.A. wrote the paper.

Present address: Division of Nano Sciences, Ewha Womans University, Seoul 120-750, Korea.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rha{at}suiling.princeton.edu

© 2006 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA

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