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This study demonstrates that environmental fluctuations can stabilize bacteriophage-bacteria interactions and prevent population collapse through a resonance mechanism called frequency locking. Using mathematical modeling, researchers found that periodic environmental changes suppress destructive population oscillations that would otherwise lead to extinction in static conditions. Counterintuitively, the research reveals that bacteria with lower growth rates survive better under high viral infection pressure, explaining why infected bacteria often exhibit reduced growth.
Why it matters
The findings provide a theoretical framework for predicting how microbial communities respond to environmental stress and fluctuations in dynamic ecosystems like soils and oceans. This understanding has potential applications in phage therapy design, microbiome management strategies, and predicting how climate change might affect microbial community stability and resilience.
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arXiv:2512.08224v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Bacteriophage-bacteria interactions are central to microbial ecology, influencing evolution, biogeochemical cycles, and pathogen behavior. Most theoretical models assume static environments and passive bacterial hosts, neglecting the joint effects of bacterial traits and environmental fluctuations on coexistence dynamics. This limitation hinders the prediction of microbial persistence in dynamic ecosystems such as soils and oceans. Using a minimal ordinary differential equation framework, we demonstrate that environmental fluctuations can suppress destructive oscillations through resonance, promoting coexistence where static models otherwise predict collapse. Counterintuitively, we find that lower bacterial growth rates are helpful in enhancing survival under high infection pressure, elucidating the observed post-infection growth reduction. Our studies highlight bacterial hosts as active builders of ecological dynamics and environmental variation as a potential stabilizing force. Our findings thus bridge a theory-experiment gap and provide a framework for predicting microbial responses to environmental stress, which might have potential implications for phage therapy, microbiome management, and climate-impacted community resilience as well.