Competition between various phenotypic variants (PVs) derived from different survivor populations during starvation survival.

<p>Three PVs, i.e., C30-2 (A), D33-4 (B), and B33-12 (C), were competed with 93U204 cells in starvation conditions. The top panels show the population size and mutant phenotype dynamics. The bottom panels show the results of the competition experiments. For each mutant-wild-type (WT) pair, we measured the survival of the mutant-only (□), WT-only (•), or WT-mixed with 0.1% mutant (△) populations. The relative abundance of cells with the mutant phenotype was determined by examining 94 colonies in each trial. All three of the tested PVs increased their relative abundance after 14 days. Only one representative set of results (trial 1) is shown. The motility (Mot), hemolysis (Hem), proteolytic activity (Pro), growth on TCBS (TCBS), and growth on TSAS (growth) phenotype of each mutant was included in the figure and the characteristics used for differentiate mutant from WT colonies were shown in bold.