Figure 1

<p><b>A.</b> The absorbance () of each culture as a function of time. For each curve, we analyzed separately the time that elapses before the absorbance starts increasing and the variation in absorbance after this first increase has occurred. <b>B.</b> In spite of the great variance observed in A, the shape of the growth curve each culture follows is fairly stereotyped. This is represented here by the humped relationship that exists between the increase in absorbance () and current absorbance (). The curves in this figure represent the prediction of a GAM adjusted for each treatment on all replicate experiments (see text). The maximum increase in absorbance is significantly lower and occurs for higher absorbance in selected bacteria than in the ancestral lineages. <b>C.</b> Proportion of cultures which absorbance has not yet increased above that of wells containing only LB, as a function of time, for the ancestral lineage, the HDI treatment and the LDI treatment lines. This time varies a lot from one culture to another, but always positively correlates to the number of cells present in the culture after 20 hours. Overall, we found that absorbance starts increasing sooner in selected bacteria than in the ancestral lineage, although this difference was not found in one of the three replicate experiments.