Related papers: Bacterial persistence: a winning strategy?

The rise and spread of antibiotic resistance causes worsening medical cost and mortality especially for life-threatening bacteria infections, thereby posing a major threat to global health. Prescribing behavior of physicians is one of the…

A bacterial colony may develop a small number of cells genetically identical to, but phenotypically different from other normally growing bacteria. These so-called persister cells keep themselves in a dormant state and thus are insensitive…

We study a stochastic two-species chemical reaction system with two mechanisms. One mechanism consists of chemical interactions which govern the overall drift of species amounts in the system; the other mechanism consists of resampling,…

Understanding how antibiotics inhibit bacteria can help to reduce antibiotic use and hence avoid antimicrobial resistance - yet few theoretical models exist for bacterial growth inhibition by a clinically relevant antibiotic treatment…

Whether evolution can be predicted is a key question in evolutionary biology. Here we set out to better understand the repeatability of evolution. We explored experimentally the effect of mutation supply and the strength of selective…

We present a two-species population model in a well-mixed environment where the dynamics involves, in addition to birth and death, changes due to environmental factors and inter-species interactions. The novel dynamical components are…

Bacteriophages are viruses infecting bacteria and archaea. Many phage species cause infections which lead to the certain death of the infected prokaryotic host cell and the release of a large batch of phage progeny, yet they have been able…

Antibiotic resistance is a major threat to global health. It emerges in multispecies microbial communities under antibiotic exposure. This makes antibiotic spectrum -- a drug's distribution of effects across species -- a potential key…

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…

Metagenomics has revealed hundreds of bacterial species in almost all microbiota. In a few well-studied cases, bacterial communities have been observed to coordinate their metabolic fluxes. In principle, bacteria can divide tasks to reap…

How cells maintain a stable size has fascinated scientists since the beginning of modern biology, but has remained largely mysterious. Recently, however, the ability to analyze single bacteria in real time has provided new, important…

As ecologists increasingly adopt stochastic models over deterministic ones, the question arises: when is this a positive development and when is this an unnecessary complication? While deterministic models -- like the Lotka-Volterra model…

Experimental studies of microbial communities routinely reveal that they have multiple stable states. While each of these states is generally resilient, certain perturbations such as antibiotics, probiotics and diet shifts, result in…

One of the most challenging problems in microbiology is to understand how a small fraction of microbes that resists killing by antibiotics can emerge in a population of genetically identical cells, the phenomenon known as persistence or…

Persistence is an important characteristic of many complex systems in nature, related to how long the system remains at a certain state before changing to a different one. The study of complex systems' persistence involves different…

Understanding under what conditions populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, persist is an issue of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and environmental fluctuations…

Prolonged lag time can be induced by starvation contributing to the antibiotic tolerance of bacteria. We analyze the optimal lag time to survive and grow the iterative and stochastic application of antibiotics. A simple model shows that the…

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…

Fractional killing in response to drugs is a hallmark of non-genetic cellular heterogeneity. Yet how individual lineages evade drug treatment, as observed in bacteria and cancer cells, is not quantitatively understood. We analyse a…

Antibiotics are the wonder discoveries to combat microbes. For decades, multiple varieties of antibiotics have been used for therapeutic purposes in hospital settings and communities throughout the world. Unfortunately, bacteria have become…