Frequency dependent microbial growth during cycles of feast and famine

In Nature microbial populations are subject to fluctuating nutrient levels. Nutrient abundance fluctuations are important for evolutionary and ecological dynamics in microbial communities since they impact growth rates, population sizes and microbial physiology. Here we use automated continuous-culture devices and single-cell imaging to show that when populations of Escherichia coli are subject to cycles of nutrient excess (feasts) and scarcity (famine) that their growth rate during feasts depends on their history of exposure to famine. A model predicts that this dependence arises from increases in the duration of lag-phase with the duration of starvation. We validate this prediction using measurements of lag-phase duration.