Mike, Mal and I have just published a new article in Evolutionary Applications. It’s a nice paper and I’m proud that it is in an Evolutionary Journal. It feels like my PhD training on Evolutionary Ecology is now complete.
The article builds heavily on the first paper from my PhD where we showed that interference competition was an important trait when determining nasal colonisation by Staphylococcus aureus.
Using the strains collected in our first study, we examined the ability of toxin producing S. epidermidis strains to restrict the invasion of S. aureus. We found that they could restrict invasion but only under spatially structured environments.
Interestingly, we also saw the toxin producing strains of S. epidermidis were able to increase toxin production in response to challenges from invading S. aureus strains.
For details, please have a look at the publication here.
The effects of spatial structure, frequency dependence and resistance evolution on the dynamics of toxin-mediated microbial invasions.
Libberton B, Horsburgh MJ, Brockhurst MA.
Evol Appl. 2015 Aug;8(7):738-50. doi: 10.1111/eva.12284. Epub 2015 Jul 16.
PMID: 26240609