Abstract:
The survival of microbes depends on their ability to acquire space and nutrients as well as compete with other groups of microbes. Relatively fit microbes should completely outcompete their weaker counterparts, but such outcomes are not commonly observed in nature. In structured environments, such as soil or the mammalian gut, the structure itself may determine which microbes dominate and which are driven to exclusion. Our goal was to create a stochastic simulation that approximated the chance nature of ecological interactions to predict dynamics and timescales on which steric structure influences microbial competition. Future work will derive more data from this model and compare them with previous models from our lab.