中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院刘陈立研究员实验室和加州大学圣地亚哥分校华泰立教授实验室合作，揭示了一种生物扩张栖息地的进性化稳定策略。2019年11月6日，《自然》杂志在线发表了这项成果。

研究人员应用了一种进化方案来研究了细菌扩展范围的过程中，定殖不同大小的栖息地的表型要求。与直观的期望更快越好相反，研究人员表明对于给定的栖息地大小，存在最佳的扩展速度。

研究人员的分析表明，这种影响源于不断扩大的种群前端的先驱细胞之间的相互作用，并揭示了一种简单、进化稳定的策略，可以定殖一个特定大小的栖息地：以生长速率乘积给出的速度扩张和栖息地的大小。

这些结果说明稳定与侵袭是在复杂生态过程中选择表型的有力原则。

据介绍，一个物种在新近可用的栖息地中定殖的能力对其整体适应性至关重要。一般而言，运动性和快速扩张对定殖有利，因此对有机体的适应性也有利。

附：英文原文

Title: An evolutionarily stable strategy to colonize spatially extended habitats

Author: Weirong Liu, Jonas Cremer, Dengjin Li, Terence Hwa, Chenli Liu

Issue&Volume: 2019-11-06

Abstract: The ability of a species to colonize newly available habitats is crucial to its overall fitness1,2,3. In general, motility and fast expansion are expected to be beneficial for colonization and hence for the fitness of an organism4,5,6,7. Here we apply an evolution protocol to investigate phenotypical requirements for colonizing habitats of different sizes during range expansion by chemotaxing bacteria8. Contrary to the intuitive expectation that faster is better, we show that there is an optimal expansion speed for a given habitat size. Our analysis showed that this effect arises from interactions among pioneering cells at the front of the expanding population, and revealed a simple, evolutionarily stable strategy for colonizing a habitat of a specific size: to expand at a speed given by the product of the growth rate and the habitat size. These results illustrate stability-to-invasion as a powerful principle for the selection of phenotypes in complex ecological processes.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1734-x

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1734-x