Thus demonstrating the importance of chemical interactions in structuring the spatiotemporal distribution of bacterial populations. The degree of similarity between population distributions is influenced by the initial culture We observed BAY 1895344 in vitro that the population distribution in habitats on the same device, which were inoculated with cells coming from the same set
of initial cultures, are highly similar to each other (e.g. compare the five habitats in Figure 6A). Even in the early phases of colonization, when there are only about a thousand cells present in the entire habitat, patterns are similar to each other (e.g. compare Figure 2B and D and see Additional files 2 and 3 for all data). Conversely, we observed a large variation between the population
distributions in habitats located on different devices that were inoculated with cells coming from different sets of initial cultures (e.g. compare Figure 6A with 6B or C). Figure 6 Similarity of spatiotemporal patterns for habitats inoculated with same cultures. Kymographs show the fluorescence intensity of strains JEK1036 (green; inoculated from the left at t = 0 h) and JEK1037 (red; inoculated from the right at t = 0 h). (A) Five parallel habitats in the same device (type 1) with separate PF-02341066 supplier inlets, each kymograph shows the spatiotemporal pattern of a single habitat. (B) Habitat on a different device inoculated with a different set of initial cultures (with separate inlets; type-1) than in panel A. (C) Habitat in a device Olopatadine (type-2) with a shared inlet. Note the similarity between the patterns of the five habitats in panel A (all inoculated with the same initial cultures), compared to the patterns of the habitats in panels B and C (inoculated with different cultures than the habitats in A). We performed a quantitative analysis to investigate whether there is a significant difference in the degree of similarity between habitats located on the same device, which were inoculated from the same cultures, compared
to habitats located on different devices, which were inoculated from different cultures. The similarity of patterns was quantified by calculating the difference between the patterns using eq. 1 (Methods), which ranges from d = 0 for identical patterns to d = 1 for maximally different patterns. We found that the average difference between the population distributions in habitats located on the same device and inoculated from the same set of initial cultures (d same ) is significantly smaller than the average difference between patterns of habitats inoculated with different sets of initial cultures (d different , see Additional file 9). This is the case both for devices with independent inlets (24 habitats in 6 type-1 devices, randomization test, p < 0.001;