Related papers: Failure of antibiotic treatment in microbial popul…
Many biological populations, such as bacterial colonies, have developed through evolution a protection mechanism, called bet-hedging, to increase their probability of survival under stressful environmental fluctutation. In this context, the…
A system modeling bacteriophage treatments with coinfections in a noisy context is analyzed. We prove that in a small noise regime, the system converges in the long term to a bacteria free equilibrium. Moreover, we compare the treatment…
Major advances in public health have resulted from disease prevention. However, prevention of a new infectious disease by vaccination or pharmaceuticals is made difficult by the slow process of vaccine and drug development. We propose an…
In microbial studies, samples are often treated under different experimental conditions and then tested for microbial survival. A technique, dating back to the 1880's, consists of diluting the samples several times and incubating each…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
Colonies of bacteria grown on thin agar plate exhibit fractal patterns as a result of adaptation to their environments. The bacterial colony pattern formation is regulated crucially by chemotaxis, the movement of cells along a chemical…
Consider a setup in which a decision maker is informed about the population by a finite sample and based on that sample has to decide whether or not to apply a certain treatment. We work out finite sample minimax regret treatment rules…
Microbial communities feature an immense diversity of species and this diversity is linked with outcomes ranging from ecosystem stability to medical prognoses. Yet the mechanisms underlying microbial diversity are under debate. While simple…
It has been known for many years that small fractions of persister cells resist killing in many bacterial colony-antimicrobial confrontations. These persisters are not believed to be mutants. Rather it has been hypothesized that they are…
Inputs to signaling pathways can have complex statistics that depend on the environment and on the behavioral response to previous stimuli. Such behavioral feedback is particularly important in navigation. Successful navigation relies on…
We introduce a new coordination problem in distributed computing that we call the population stability problem. A system of agents each with limited memory and communication, as well as the ability to replicate and self-destruct, is…
In this paper, a reaction-diffusion system modeling injection of a chemotherapeutic drug on the surface of a living tissue during a treatment for cancer patients is studied. The system describes the interaction of the chemotherapeutic drug…
The applicability of the Fisher equation, which combines diffusion with logistic nonlinearity, to population dynamics of bacterial colonies is studied with the help of explicit analytic solutions for the spatial distribution of a stationary…
The dynamics of growth of bacterial populations has been extensively studied for planktonic cells in well-agitated liquid culture, in which all cells have equal access to nutrients. In the real world, bacteria are more likely to live in…
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) threatens global health. A promising and underexplored strategy to tackle this problem is sequential therapies exploiting collateral sensitivity (CS), whereby resistance to one drug increases sensitivity to…
In microbial communities, each species often has multiple, distinct phenotypes, but studies of ecological stability have largely ignored this subpopulation structure. Here, we show that such implicit averaging over phenotypes leads to…
While chemoresistance in primary tumors is well-studied, much less is known about the influence of systemic chemotherapy on the development of drug resistance at metastatic sites. In this work, we use a hybrid spatial model of tumor…
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria has posed a grave threat to public health by causing a number of nosocomial infections in hospitals. Mathematical models have been used to study the transmission of antibiotic-resistant bacteria within a…
The body is home to a diverse microbiota, mainly in the gut. Resistant bacteria are selected for by antibiotic treatments, and once resistance becomes widespread in a population of hosts, antibiotics become useless. Here, we develop a…
A dynamic model for failures in biological organisms is proposed and studied both analytically and numerically. Each cell in the organism becomes dead under sufficiently strong stress, and is then allowed to be healed with some probability.…