Fig. 4.

WS morphotypes outcompete ancestor in Δhag but not wild type background. a Microscopy images of competitions between green (GFP) and red (mKATE) fluorescently labelled wild type (left) or hag mutant (right) and derived WS morphotypes (SinR^L99S). False colored images of wells of a 24-well plate (diameter: 16 mm) are displayed. Control competitions with swapped fluorescent reporters (2nd row) and between otherwise identical strains (3rd and 4th row) were performed for each. b Semi-quantitative analysis of relative signal abundance for competitions of ancestor and WS morphotype from (a) (two sample Student’s t test assuming unequal variances: WT^GFP + WTWS^mKATE P = 0.005; WTWS^GFP + WT^mKATE P = 0.134; Δhag^GFP + ΔhagWS^mKATE P = 2.8∙10^− 4; ΔhagWS^GFP + Δhag^mKATE P = 0.0027; n = 4). Error bars represent the standard deviation. Raw data available in Additional file 1: Supplementary Dataset 1