Related papers: Selective sweeps in growing microbial colonies
Turing patterns are a cornerstone of biological self-organization, yet their emergence typically requires finely tuned parameters occupying narrow regions of high-dimensional space. This poses a fundamental challenge: how can evolving…
Shared resources enhance productivity yet at the same time provide channels for biological and digital contamination, turning physical or digital hygiene into a cooperation dilemma prone to free-riding. Here we introduce a game of…
Species sharing a habitat will co-evolve to make use of the available resources, as consumption is modulated by competition and negative feedback loops between consumers and resources. The dietary range of a given species determines the…
Evolutionary dynamics and patterns of molecular evolution are strongly influenced by selection on linked regions of the genome, but our quantitative understanding of these effects remains incomplete. Recent work has focused on predicting…
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…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
This paper presents an interesting experimental example of voter-model statistics in biology. In recent work on mouse tail-skin, where proliferating cells are confined to a two-dimensional layer, we showed that cells proliferate and…
Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature and technology. They inhabit diverse environments ranging from small river tributaries and lakes to oceans, as well as wastewater treatment plants and food manufacturing. In many of these…
Microbes thrive in diverse porous environments -- from soil and riverbeds to human lungs and cancer tissues -- spanning multiple scales and conditions. Short- to long-term fluctuations in local factors induce spatio-temporal…
Spatial evolutionary games model individuals who are distributed in a spatial domain and update their strategies upon playing a normal form game with their neighbors. We derive integro-differential equations as deterministic approximations…
In the framework of a 1D cyclic competition model, the Rock-Paper-Scissor model, where bacteria are allowed to mutate and move in space, we study the formation of stochastic patterns, where all the bacteria species do coexist. We modelled…
Many porous media are mixtures of inert and reactive materials, manifesting spatio-chemical heterogeneity. We study the evolution of scalar transport in a chemically heterogeneous material that mimics a green roof soil substrate,…
An active area of research interest is the inference of ecological models of complex microbial communities. Inferring such ecological models entails understanding the interactions between microbes and how they affect each other's growth.…
We present a spatial, individual-based predator-prey model in which dispersal is dependent on the local community. We determine species suitability to the biotic conditions of their local environment through a time and space varying fitness…
We investigate the evolution of quiescence within the framework of Adaptive Dynamics for an SIQS (Susceptible - Infected - Quiescent) model with constant environment. In the first part of the paper, the competition of two strains which have…
The transition from localized to systemic spreading of bacteria, viruses and other agents is a fundamental problem that spans medicine, ecology, biology and agriculture science. We have conducted experiments and simulations in a simple…
Effects of externally imposed periodic changes in the environment on population dynamics are studied with the help of a simple model. The environmental changes are represented by the temporal and spatial dependence of the competition terms…
Unraveling bacterial strategies for spatial exploration is crucial for understanding the complexity in the organization of life. Bacterial motility determines the spatio-temporal structure of microbial communities, controls infection…
During their evolution, proteins explore sequence space via an interplay between random mutations and phenotypic selection. Here we build upon recent progress in reconstructing data-driven fitness landscapes for families of homologous…
Much of our understanding of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms derives from analysis of low-dimensional models: with few interacting species, or few axes defining "fitness". It is not always clear to what extent the intuition derived…