Data from: The quick and the dead: microbial demography at the yeast thermal limit

The niche of microorganisms is determined by where their populations can
expand. Populations can fail to grow because of high death or low birth
rates, but these are challenging to measure in microorganisms. We
developed a novel technique that enables single cell measurement of
age-structured birth and death rates in the budding yeast, Saccharomyces
cerevisiae, and used this method to study responses to heat stress in a
genetically diverse panel of strains. We find that individual cells show
significant heterogeneity in their rates of birth and death during heat
stress. Genotype-by-environment effects on processes that regulate
asymmetric cell division contribute to this heterogeneity. These lead to
either premature senescence or early life mortality during heat stress,
and we find that a mitochondrial inheritance defect explains the early
life mortality phenotype of one of the strains we studied. This study
demonstrates how the interplay of physiology, genetic variation, and
environmental variables influence where microbial populations survive and
flourish.