< Back to Article

Slow spatial migration can help eradicate cooperative antimicrobial resistance in time-varying environments

Fig 2

The eradication of R cells depends on the bottleneck strength and migration rate.

The shared parameters in all panels are , , L = 20, a = 0.25, s = 0.1, N_th = 40, and (Model & Methods) with migration according to Eq. (2a). Other parameters are as listed in Table 1. Panel A: Heatmap of the probability P(N_R(t)= 0) of total extinction of R (resistant) cells as a function of bottleneck strength, , and migration rate m at time t = 500. Each value pair represents an ensemble average of independent simulations, where we show the fraction of realisations resulting in complete extinction of R (resistant) microbes after 500 microbial generations (standard error of the mean in P(N_R(t = 500)=0) below 4%; see S1 Appendix Sec. 3.3.2). The colour bar ranges from light to dark red, where darkest red indicates complete R extinction in all 200 simulations at time t = 500, P(N_R(t = 500)=0)=1. The green line is the theoretical prediction of Eq. (6) and the white dashed vertical line indicates an axis break separating m = 0 and (Model & Methods). The black and white annotated letters point to the specific values used in the outer panels. Panels B-H: Typical example trajectories of the fraction of demes without R cells, up to t = 500 microbial generations (gen.), defined by Eq. (7) and corresponding to the fixation of S in the metapopulation. (The fraction of demes without S cells, , is vanishingly small and unnoticeable.) Here, is shown as a function of time (microbial generations) for the value pairs indicated in Panel A (see S1 Appendix Sec. 3).

doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013997.g002