Linking spatial drug heterogeneity to microbial growth dynamics in theory and experiment

Drugs play a central role in limiting bacterial population spread, yet laboratory studies typically assume well-mixed environments when assessing microbial drug responses. In contrast, bacteria in the human body often occupy spatially structured habitats where drug concentrations vary. Understanding how this heterogeneity shapes growth and decline is therefore essential for controlling infections and mitigating resistance evolution. Here, we developed a minimal robot-automated system to study how spatial drug heterogeneity affects short-term population dynamics in E. faecalis, a Gram-positive opportunistic pathogen. This system was combined with a theoretical framework to interpret and explain the observed outcomes. We first recapitulated the classic critical-patch-size model result: in a spatially homogeneous environment, a population persists in a finite domain only when growth outpaces diffusive losses at the boundaries. In heterogeneous environments, we found certain conditions that population persistence can depend critically on the spatial arrangement of the drug, even when its total amount is fixed. Using theoretical and experimental approaches, we identified the arrangements that produce the strongest growth and the fastest decline, revealing the range of possible outcomes under drug heterogeneity. We further tested this framework in more complex environments, including ring-shaped communities, and observed consistent arrangement-dependent behavior. Overall, our results extend the classical growth-condition framework to general heterogeneous environments and demonstrate that spatial drug arrangement - not only total dose - can strongly influence bacterial population dynamics. These findings highlight the importance of spatially structured dosing strategies and motivate further theoretical and experimental investigation.