Related papers: Switching between phenotypes and population extinc…
Stochastic phenotype switching has been suggested to play a beneficial role in microbial populations by leading to the division of labour among cells, or ensuring that at least some of the population survives an unexpected change in…
Phase variation, or stochastic switching between alternative states of gene expression, is common among microbes, and may be important in coping with changing environments. We use a theoretical model to assess whether such switching is a…
Microorganisms live in environments that inevitably fluctuate between mild and harsh conditions. As harsh conditions may cause extinctions, the rate at which fluctuations occur can shape microbial communities and their diversity, but we…
Clonal microbes can switch between different phenotypes and recent theoretical work has shown that stochastic switching between these subpopulations can stabilize microbial communities. This phenotypic switching need not be stochastic,…
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…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
Stochasticity can play an important role in the dynamics of biologically relevant populations. These span a broad range of scales: from intra-cellular populations of molecules to population of cells and then to groups of plants, animals and…
Extinction of a long-lived isolated stochastic population can be described as an exponentially slow decay of quasi-stationary probability distribution of the population size. We address extinction of a population in a two-population system…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
Bacterial populations in natural conditions are expected to experience stochastic environmental fluctuations, and in addition, environments are affected by bacterial activities since they consume substrates and excrete various chemicals. We…
We consider a stochastic model for an evolving population. We show that in the presence of genotype extinctions the population dies out for a low mutation probability but may survive for a high mutation probability. This turns upside down…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
Under low concentrations of antibiotics causing DNA damage, \textit{Escherichia coli} bacteria can trigger stochastically a stress response known as the SOS response. While the expression of this stress response can make individual cells…
We investigate extinction of a long-lived self-regulating stochastic population, caused by intrinsic (demographic) noise. Extinction typically occurs via one of two scenarios depending on whether the absorbing state n=0 is a repelling…
Motivated by recent understandings in the stochastic natures of gene expression, biochemical signaling, and spontaneous reversible epigenetic switchings, we study a simple deterministic cell population dynamics in which subpopulations grow…
Motivated by modeling the dynamics of a population living in a flowing medium where the environmental factors are random in space, we have studied an asymmetric variant of the one-dimensional contact process, where the quenched random…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
Sexually reproducing populations with small number of individuals may go extinct by stochastic fluctuations in sex determination, causing all their members to become male or female in a generation. In this work we calculate the time to…
The goal of this article is to contribute towards the conceptual and quantitative understanding of the evolutionary benefits for (microbial) populations to maintain a seed bank (consisting of dormant individuals) when facing fluctuating…