Fig. 2: Larger engineered populations kill competitors faster.

a The two strains are co-cultured in a microtitre plate and the subpopulation fractions are determined using fluorescent proteins in the engineered strain and the FlopR software⁴⁰, allowing us to track the population dynamics over time. b The blue shaded area shows the period during which the competitor ratio is above its initial ratio; the orange shaded area shows the same for the engineered strain. The red dashed line indicates the time point at which the change from competitor to engineered strain dominance occurs. c Graph showing the “winning” strain at each timepoint of co-cultures with four different initial ratios. The colour and saturation of each block are given by the difference between the initial strain ratio and the ratio at that timepoint. The dashed red box shows the point in b at which the engineered strain begins to win. In a and b, lines show the mean of the rolling mean (centred window size = 3) and the shaded ribbons show the standard deviation of three replicates. In c, each horizontal summarises three replicate timecourses; the shaded rectangles show the mean proportional population change at each time point.