Micro Habitat Patches (MHPs) and Bacterial Metapopulations
By combining nanotechnology with landscape ecology, a habitat landscape can be nanofabricated on-chip by building a collection of nanofabricated bacterial habitats, and connecting them by corridors in different topological arrangements and with nano-scale channels providing them with the local ecosystem service of habitat renewal. These landscapes of MHPs can be used as physical implementations of an adaptive landscape : by generating a spatial mosaic of patches of opportunity distributed in space and time. The patchy nature of these fluidic landscapes allows for the study of adapting bacterial cells in a metapopulation system operating on-chip within a synthetic ecosystem. The metapopulation biology and evolutionary ecology of these bacterial systems, in these synthetic ecosystems, can be addressed using experimental biophysics.
Read more about this topic: Metapopulation
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