English

The colon-pile

Populations and Evolution 2020-03-09 v1 Statistical Mechanics Biological Physics

Abstract

Bacteria populate the colon where they replicate and migrate in response to nutrient availability. Here I model the colon bacterial population as a sandpile model, the colon-pile. Sand addition mimics bacterial replication and grains toppling represents bacterial migration coupled to high population density. The numerical simulations reveal a behaviour similar to non-conservative sandpile models, approaching a critical state with system wide avalanches when the death rate becomes negligible. The critical exponents estimation indicates that the colon-pile belongs to a new universality class. This work suggest that the colon microbiome is in a self-organised critical state, where small perturbations can trigger large scale rearrangements, covering an area comparable to the system size and characterised by a 1/f noise spectra

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.03232,
  title  = {The colon-pile},
  author = {Alexei Vazquez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.03232},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

4 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:06:36.437Z