Causes and consequences of pattern diversification in a spatially self-organizing microbial community

Surface-attached microbial communities constitute a vast amount of life on our planet. They contribute to all major biogeochemical cycles, provide essential services to our society and environment, and have important effects on human health and disease. They typically consist of different interacting genotypes that arrange themselves non-randomly across space (referred to hereafter as spatial self-organization). While spatial self-organization is important for the functioning, ecology, and evolution of these communities, the underlying determinants of spatial self-organization remain unclear. Here, we performed a combination of experiments, statistical modeling, and mathematical simulations with a synthetic cross-feeding microbial community consisting of two isogenic strains. We found that two different patterns of spatial self-organization emerged at the same length and time scales, thus demonstrating pattern diversification. This pattern diversification was not caused by initial environmental heterogeneity or by genetic heterogeneity within populations. Instead, it was caused by nongenetic heterogeneity within populations, and we provide evidence that the source of this nongenetic heterogeneity is local differences in the initial spatial positionings of individuals. We further demonstrate that the different patterns exhibit different community-level properties; namely, they have different expansion speeds. Together, our results demonstrate that pattern diversification can emerge in the absence of initial environmental heterogeneity or genetic heterogeneity within populations and can affect community-level properties, thus providing novel insights into the causes and consequences of microbial spatial self-organization.