The strength of interspecies interaction in a microbial community determines its susceptibility to invasion
Fig 3
Two-way competitions reveal heightened interspecific competition and ecological specialization in the evolved communities.
Two-way species interactions were determined by measuring selection coefficients for two-way competition experiments between (A) colicin-producing E. coli and susceptible E. coli, (B) colicin-producing E. coli and S. Typhimurium, and (C) cognate pairs of E. coli and S. Typhimurium. Eight replicates were used in each case and the line in the center represents the median value. In each case, ancestral clones are denoted as Anc and evolved clones are denoted as Evo. The X-axis represents the ancestral and evolved clones/communities and the Y-axis represents the selection coefficients showing the change in frequency of the first species with respect to the second species. A Student’s t test (with Bonferroni’s correction for multiple testing) was performed to determine statistically significant differences (denoted as * for p < 0.05) between the ancestral and each of the evolved states. The numbers on the X-axis represent the strain IDs for ancestral and evolved clones of E. coli and S. Typhimurium used in the study. The data underlying this figure can be found in S1 Data, in the sheet titled Fig 3.