Research data of an article: "Application of high resolution melting assay (HMR) to study temperature dependent infraspecific competition in an pathogenic bacterium."

Studies on species’ responses to climate change have focused largely on the direct effect of abiotic factors and in particular temperature, neglecting the effects of biotic interactions in determining the outcome of climate change projections. Many microbes rely on strong interference competition; hence the fitness of many pathogenic bacteria could be a function of both their growth properties and intraspecific competition. However, due to technical challenges in distinguishing and tracking individual strains, experimental evidence on intraspecific competition has been limited so far. Here, we developed a robust application of the high-resolution melting (HRM) assay to study head-to-head competition between mixed genotype co-cultures of a waterborne bacterial pathogen of fish, Flavobacterium columnare, at two different temperatures. We found that competition outcome in liquid cultures seemed to be well predicted by growth yield of isolated strains, but was mostly inconsistent with interference competition results measured in inhibition tests on solid agar, especially as no growth inhibition between strain pairs was detected at the higher temperature. These results suggest that, for a given temperature, the factors driving competition outcome differ between liquid and solid environments.

关于物种对气候变化响应的研究，主要集中于非生物因素，尤其是温度的直接效应，而忽视了生物相互作用在确定气候变化预测结果中的作用。众多微生物依赖于强烈的干扰竞争，因此许多致病菌的适应性可能既是其生长特性的函数，也是种内竞争的结果。然而，由于在区分和追踪单个菌株方面存在技术挑战，迄今为止关于种内竞争的实验证据有限。在本研究中，我们开发了一种基于高分辨率融解曲线（HRM）分析的稳健方法，用于研究两种不同温度下，一种水生鱼类病原菌——柱状黄杆菌——的混合基因型共培养菌株之间的面对面竞争。我们发现，在液体培养基中，竞争结果似乎可以由分离菌株的生长产量进行良好预测，但在固体琼脂上的抑制试验中测量的干扰竞争结果则与之大多不一致，尤其是在较高温度下，菌株对之间没有检测到生长抑制。这些结果表明，对于特定的温度，驱动竞争结果的因素在液体和固体环境中存在差异。