Related papers: Gene regulation in continuous cultures: A unified …
When bacteria are grown on a mixture of two growth-limiting substrates, they exhibit a rich spectrum of substrate consumption patterns including diauxic growth, simultaneous consumption, and bistable growth. In previous work, we showed that…
Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature and come in a multitude of forms, ranging from communities dominated by a handful of species to communities containing a wide variety of metabolically distinct organisms. This huge range in…
The cell cycle is a tightly controlled process, yet its underlying genetic network shows marked differences across species. Which of the associated structural features follow solely from the ability to impose the appropriate gene expression…
Yeast cells grown in culture can spontaneously synchronize their respiration, metabolism, gene expression and cell division. Such metabolic oscillations in synchronized cultures reflect single-cell oscillations, but the relationship between…
The simultaneous growth of multiple microbial species is a problem of fundamental ecological interest. In media containing more than one growth-limiting substrate, multiple species can coexist. The question then arises: Can single-species…
Bacteria live in environments that are continuously fluctuating and changing. Exploiting any predictability of such fluctuations can lead to an increased fitness. On longer timescales bacteria can "learn" the structure of these fluctuations…
Cell growth and gene expression, essential elements of all living systems, have long been the focus of biophysical interrogation. Advances in single-cell methods have invigorated theoretical studies into these processes. However, until…
To maintain a constant cell size, dividing cells have to coordinate cell cycle events with cell growth. This coordination has for long been supposed to rely on the existence of size thresholds determining cell cycle progression [1]. In…
Nutrient gradients and limitations play a pivotal role in the life of all microbes, both in their natural habitat as well as in artificial, microfluidic systems. Spatial concentration gradients of nutrients in densely packed cell…
Organisms across all domains of life regulate the size of their cells. However, the means by which this is done is poorly understood. We study two abstracted "molecular" models for size regulation: inhibitor dilution and initiator…
Cell colonies of bacteria, tumour cells and fungi, under nutrient limited growth conditions, exhibit complex branched growth patterns. In order to investigate this phenomenon we present a simple hybrid cellular automaton model of cell…
Growth in bacterial populations generally depends on the environment (availability and quality of nutrients, presence of a toxic inhibitor, product inhibition..). Here, we build a model to describe the action of a bacteriostatic antibiotic,…
A packed community of exponentially proliferating microbes will spread in size exponentially. However, due to nutrient depletion, mechanical constraints, or other limitations, exponential proliferation is not indefinite, and the spreading…
Nutrient limitation is one of the most common triggers of antibiotic tolerance and persistence. Here, we present two microfluidic setups to study how spatial and temporal variation in nutrient availability lead to increased survival of…
Bacteria are highly adaptive microorganisms that thrive in a wide range of growth conditions via changes in cell morphologies and macromolecular composition. How bacterial morphologies are regulated in diverse environmental conditions is a…
Various bacterial strains exhibit colonial branching patterns during growth on poor substrates. These patterns reflect bacterial cooperative self-organization and cybernetic processes of communication, regulation and control employed during…
High-throughput experimental techniques and bioinformatics tools make it possible to obtain reconstructions of the metabolism of microbial species. Combined with mathematical frameworks such as flux balance analysis, which assumes that…
The regulation of metabolic activity by tuning enzyme expression levels is crucial to sustain cellular growth in changing environments. Metabolic networks are often studied at steady state using constraint-based models and optimization…
Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random…
Gene regulatory networks constitute the first layer of the cellular computation for cell adaptation and surveillance. In these webs, a set of causal relations is built up from thousands of interactions between transcription factors and…