Fig. 6: Phage lysis maintains strain diversity.

Data were for individual-based computational simulations of the surface-associated growth of co-cultures consisting of between two and ten strains, where each strain has a different growth rate ranging between zero and one. The growth rate of one strain is one and the growth rates of the other strains are sampled from a uniform distribution. a–d The strain diversity metrics are for a fixed total biomass size and include a strain richness, b Shannon diversity, c Simpson diversity, and d evenness. For b–d, the boxplots identify the mean values, interquartile ranges, and outliers for independent pairs of simulations (n = 35 for each number of cell types). The black boxplots and data points are in the absence of phage and the green boxplots and data points are in the presence of phage. The p values are for two-sided paired t-tests with a Bonferroni correction. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.