Related papers: Bacterial persistence: a winning strategy?
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…
Microbes are everywhere, including in and on our bodies, and have been shown to play key roles in a variety of prevalent human diseases. Consequently, there has been intense interest in the design of bacteriotherapies or "bugs as drugs,"…
The bacterium E. coli maneuvers itself to regions with high chemoattractant concentrations by performing two stereotypical moves: `runs', in which it moves in near straight lines, and `tumbles', in which it does not advance but changes…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
Antibiotic resistance constitutes a major health threat. Predicting bacterial causes of infections is key to reducing antibiotic misuse, a leading driver of antibiotic resistance. We train a machine learning algorithm on administrative and…
Ecology and evolution under changing environments are important in many subfields of biology with implications for medicine. Here, we explore an example: the consequences of fluctuating environments on the emergence of antibiotic…
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…
Phage therapy is an alternative treatment method for bacterial infections. It has shown particular promise in reducing bacterial load while preventing antibiotic resistance. Here, we develop a mathematical model of a bacterial infection…
The evolution and emergence of antibiotic resistance is a major public health concern. The understanding of the within-host microbial dynamics combining mutational processes, horizontal gene transfer and resource consumption, is one of the…
A stochastic model for the growth of a virus in a cell population is introduced. The virus has two ways of spreading: either by allowing its host cell to live on and duplicate, or else by multiplying in large numbers within the host cell…
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…
The evolution of antibiotic resistance among bacteria threatens our continued ability to treat infectious diseases. The need for sustainable strategies to cure bacterial infections has never been greater. So far, all attempts to restore…
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…
This paper investigates the stochastic permanence of malaria and the existence of a stationary distribution for the stochastic process describing the disease dynamics over sufficiently longtime. The malaria system is highly random with…
We study some simple mathematical models designed to test the following hypothesis: can a pathogen escape the immune system only because of its high probability of mutation? We propose both spatial and non-spatial models. In all of our…
We present a generic mechanism by which reproducing microorganisms, with a diffusivity that depends on the local population density, can form stable patterns. It is known that a decrease of swimming speed with density can promote separation…
Risk spreading in bacterial populations is generally regarded as a strategy to maximize survival. Here, we study its role during range expansion of a genetically diverse population where growth and motility are two alternative traits. We…
Quantification of heritability is a fundamental desideratum in genetics, which allows an assessment of the contribution of additive genetic variation to the variability of a trait of interest. The traditional computational approaches for…
Horizontal gene transfer consists in exchanging genetic materials between microorganisms during their lives. This is a major mechanism of bacterial evolution and is believed to be of main importance in antibiotics resistance. We consider a…
We propose a mathematical model of Antimicrobial Resistance in the host to predict the failure of two antagonists of bacterial growth: the immune response and a single-antibiotic therapy. After characterising the initial bacterial load that…