Information sharing promotes bacterial diversity in oligotrophic environment with low-dose X-ray radiation based on modeling and simulation of agent-based model

It remains unclear why bacterial diversity was formed and maintained in oligotrophic environment (OE) with low-dose X-ray radiation (LDXR) due to violation of the competitive exclusion principle in ecology. Based on microbial ecology, bioinformatics, cybernetics, experimental phenomena and data, a new hypothesis was proposed to elucidate information sharing mechanisms driving bacterial community succession with high diversity in OE with LDXR. According to hypothesis, a valid agent-based model (ABM) of cellular automation (CA) was developed to quantitatively describe the hypothesis, and the agent-based simulation sufficiently proved that as the bacterial individuals conduct cooperation to indiscriminately share information of substrate positions with each other in OE with LDXR, it can effectively increase the survival probabilities of all bacterial species, alleviate interspecific competition, and prevent any bacterial species from being dominant, which is beneficial to the coexistence of most species and promotes bacterial diversity during community succession. The results of agentbased simulation are highly similar to the observed phenomena and data in the experiments, therefore sufficiently confirm the proposed hypothesis. This study could not only lay the theoretical foundation for understanding of the crucial role information sharing plays in formation and maintenance of bacterial diversity but also offer effective guidance for bacterial prevention and control as well as other ecological engineering applications.