(IMAGE)

Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Caption

The experiment (bacterial colony and amino acid measurements by means of mass spectrometry imaging, left) corresponds to computer simulations (right): Cooperative bacteria are shown in red, non-cooperative bacteria are green. The opportunistic bacteria can only exist on the fringe of cooperating bacterial colonies. This isolation effect is due to the fact that cooperators can only grow where the local density of non-cooperators is low, thus leading to an exclusion of non-cooperators from the released amino acids.

Credit

S. Pande / Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology; S. Lang / Department of Bioinformatics, Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

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