QUANTITATIVE STUDIES OF BACTERIAL CHEMOTAXIS AND MICROBIAL-POPULATION DYNAMICS

Although there is a long history of conjecture regarding the role and significance of bacterial chemotaxis in microbial ecology, only recently has a significant body of work appeared attempting to address this issue. The purpose of this paper is to provide a concise overview of this work, which combines mathematical modeling of bacterial population migration and experimental measurement of the model parameters with modeling of competitive microbial population dynamics in a nonmixed environment. Predictions from the population dynamics models, based on experimental estimates of the various motility and growth parameter values, are related to the small number of experimental observations available to date dealing with the effects of bacterial motility on competition in a nonmixed environment. Current results indicate that cell motility and chemotaxis properties can be as important to population dynamics as cell growth kinetic properties, so that greater attention to this aspect of microbial behavior is warranted in future studies of microbial ecology.