Related papers: Supplementary information for "Selective sweeps in…
Evolutionary experiments with microbes are a powerful tool to study mutations and natural selection. These experiments, however, are often limited to the well-mixed environments of a test tube or a chemostat. Since spatial organization can…
Mechanical interactions among cells in a growing microbial colony can significantly influence the colony's spatial genetic structure and, thus, evolutionary outcomes such as the fates of rare mutations. Here, we computationally investigate…
Microbial colonies cultured on agar Petri dishes have become a model system to study biological evolution in populations expanding in space. Processes such as clonal segregation and gene surfing have been shown to be affected by…
Segregation of populations is a key question in evolution theory. One important aspect is the relation between spatial organization and the population's composition. Here we study a specific example -- sectors in expanding bacterial…
Despite the importance that fluid flow plays in transporting and organizing populations, few laboratory systems exist to systematically investigate the impact of advection on their spatial evolutionary dynamics. To address this problem, we…
How producers of public goods persist in microbial communities is a major question in evolutionary biology. Cooperation is evolutionarily unstable, since cheating strains can reproduce quicker and take over. Spatial structure has been shown…
Nutrient gradients and limitations play a pivotal role in the life of all microbes, both in their natural habitat as well as in artificial, microfluidic systems. Spatial concentration gradients of nutrients in densely packed cell…
Various bacterial strains exhibit colonial branching patterns during growth on poor substrates. These patterns reflect bacterial cooperative self-organization and cybernetic processes of communication, regulation and control employed during…
Fitness consequence of dispersal depends on property of the entire landscape, which patches are available and what are the cost of moving. These are information that are not available locally when an organism make the decision to disperse.…
An explicit proposal for experiments leading to abrupt transitions in spatially extended bacterial populations in a Petri dish is presented on the basis of an exact formula obtained through an analytic theory. The theory provides accurately…
Nutrient limitation is one of the most common triggers of antibiotic tolerance and persistence. Here, we present two microfluidic setups to study how spatial and temporal variation in nutrient availability lead to increased survival of…
We introduce an evolutionary metacommunity of multitrophic food webs on several habitats coupled by migration. In contrast to previous studies that focus either on evolutionary or on spatial aspects, we include both and investigate the…
Frequency-dependent selection reflects the interaction between different species as they battle for limited resources in their environment. In a stochastic evolutionary game the species relative fitnesses guides the evolutionary dynamics…
The expansion of biological species in natural environments is usually described as the combined effect of individual spatial dispersal and growth. In the case of aquatic ecosystems flow transport can also be extremely relevant as an extra,…
In the growth of bacterial colonies, a great variety of complex patterns are observed in experiments, depending on external conditions and the bacterial species. Typically, existing models employ systems of reaction-diffusion equations or…
Recent work suggests that cross-feeding -- the secretion and consumption of metabolic biproducts by microbes -- is essential for understanding microbial ecology. Yet how cross-feeding and competition combine to give rise to ecosystem-level…
Discrete time, spatially extended models play an important role in ecology, modelling population dynamics of species ranging from micro-organisms to birds. An important question is how 'bottom up', individual-based models can be…
The capacity to sense gradients efficiently and acquire information about the ambient environment confers many advantages like facilitating movement toward nutrient sources or away from toxic chemicals. The amplified dispersal evinced by…
Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…
The growth and evolution of microbial populations is often subjected to advection by fluid flows in spatially extended environments, with immediate consequences for questions of spatial population genetics in marine ecology, planktonic…