Related papers: A biophysical model of prokaryotic diversity in ge…
In the past years, a remarkable mapping has been found between the dynamics of a population of M individuals undergoing random mutations and selection, and that of a single system in contact with a thermal bath with temperature 1/M. This…
A previously established multiscale population genetics model states that fitness can be inferred from the physical properties of proteins under the physiological assumption that a loss of stability by any protein confers the lethal…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
Bacteria often develop distinct phenotypes to adapt to environmental stress. In particular, they can produce biofilms, dense communities of bacteria that live in a complex extracellular matrix. Bacterial biofilms provide a safe haven from…
A thermodynamic device placed outdoors, or a local ecosystem, is subject to a variety of different temperatures given by short-tem (daily) and long-term (seasonal) variations. In the long term a superstatistical description makes sense,…
Ecological and evolutionary dynamics have been historically regarded as unfolding at broadly separated timescales. However, these two types of processes are nowadays well documented to much more tightly than traditionally assumed,…
Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…
The twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss define a strong need for functional diversity monitoring. While the availability of high-quality ecological monitoring data is increasing, the quantification of functional diversity so…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
We investigate proteins within heterogeneous cell membranes where non-equilibrium phenomena arises from spatial variations in concentration and temperature. We develop simulation methods building on non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to…
In this work we employ various methods of analysis (unfolding simulations and comparative analysis of structures and sequences of proteomes of thermophilic organisms) to show that organisms can follow two major strategies of thermophilic…
The dynamics of microbial communities is incredibly complex, determined by competition for metabolic substrates and cross-feeding of byproducts. Species in the community grow by harvesting energy from chemical reactions that transform…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
The search for biosignatures necessitates developing our understanding of life under different conditions. If life can influence the climate evolution of its planet then understanding the behaviour of life-climate feedbacks under extreme…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Bacterial chemotaxis systems are as diverse as the environments that bacteria inhabit, but how much environmental variation can cells tolerate with a single system? Diversification of a single chemotaxis system could serve as an…
Having a precise knowledge of the dispersal ability of a population in a heterogeneous environment is of critical importance in agroecology and conservation biology as it can provide management tools to limit the effects of pests or to…
There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
Organisms adapt to fluctuating environments by regulating their dynamics, and by adjusting their phenotypes to environmental changes. We model population growth using multitype branching processes in random environments, where the offspring…