Microbial Communities

Drug efficacy measured using pure cultures is not maintained in the presence of neighbouring microbes. Using simple physical laws, I pinpoint the mechanism for this change to demonstrate that drug efficacy can be predictably manupulated, and suggest why microbes began to co-operate and form communities.

The link between fitness and reproduction rate is a central tenet in evolutionary biology: mutants reproducing faster than the dominant wild-type are favoured by selection, otherwise the mutation is lost. This link is given by Fisher's theorem under …