English

The sleeping bacterium: shedding light on the resuscitation mechanism

Biological Physics 2025-01-17 v1

Abstract

The revival mechanism in dormant bacteria is a puzzling and open issue. We propose a model of information diffusion on a regular grid where agents represent bacteria and their mutual interactions implement quorum sensing. Agents may have different metabolic characteristics corresponding to multiple phenotypes. The intra/inter phenotype cooperation is analyzed under different metabolic and productivity conditions. We study the interactions between rapidly reproducing active bacteria and non-reproducing quiescent bacteria. We highlight the conditions under which the quiescent bacteria may revive. The occurrence of revival is generally related to a change in environmental conditions. Our results support this picture showing that revival can be mediated by the presence of different catalyst bacteria that produce the necessary resources .

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.09366,
  title  = {The sleeping bacterium: shedding light on the resuscitation mechanism},
  author = {Eleonora Alfinito and Matteo Beccaria},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.09366},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

5 figures, 18 pages