Related papers: Tipping Elements in the Human Intestinal Ecosystem

Stability is a desirable property of complex ecosystems. If a community of interacting species is at a stable equilibrium point then it is able to withstand small perturbations to component species' abundances without suffering adverse…

We propose a minimal off-lattice model of living organisms where just a very few dynamical rules of growth are assumed. The stable coexistence of many clusters is detected when we replace the global restriction rule by a locally applied…

Many active systems are capable of forming intriguing patterns at scales significantly larger than the size of their individual constituents. Cyanobacteria are one of the most ancient and important phyla of organisms that has allowed the…

Soil microbial communities are known to be robust against perturbations such as nutrition inputs, which appears as an obstacle for the soil improvement. On the other hand, its adaptable aspect has been also reported. Here we propose simple…

Microtubules, major elements of the cell skeleton are, most of the time, well organized in vivo, but they can also show self-organizing behaviors in time and/or space in purified solutions in vitro. Theoretical studies and models based on…

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,"…

We model an enclosed system of bacteria, whose motility-induced phase separation is coupled to slow population dynamics. Without noise, the system shows both static phase separation and a limit cycle, in which a rising global population…

The human microbiome is a complex ecological system, and describing its structure and function under different environmental conditions is important from both basic scientific and medical perspectives. Viewed through a biostatistical lens,…

Ecosystems can undergo sudden shifts to undesirable states, but recent studies with simple single species ecosystems have demonstrated that advance warning can be provided by the slowing down of population dynamics near a tipping point.…

Population heterogeneity is ubiquitous among active living systems, but little is known about its role in determining their spatial organization and large-scale dynamics. Combining evidence from synthetic active fluids assembled from…

Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…

Microorganisms self-organize in very large communities exhibiting complex fluctuations. Despite recent advances, still the mechanism by which these systems are able to exhibit large variability at the one hand and dynamical robustness on…

To better understand and manage complex systems like ecosystems it is critical to know the relative contribution of system components to system functioning. Ecologists and social scientists have described many ways that individuals can be…

The evolution of antimicrobial resistance can be strongly affected by variations of antimicrobial concentration. Here, we study the impact of periodic alternations of absence and presence of antimicrobial on resistance evolution in a…

The metabolic activity of microbes has played an essential role in the evolution and persistence of life on Earth. Microbial metabolism plays a primary role in the flow of carbon, nitrogen and other elements through the biosphere on a…

The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…

The evolution of antimicrobial resistance generally occurs in an environment where antimicrobial concentration is variable, which has dramatic consequences on the microorganisms' fitness landscape, and thus on the evolution of resistance.…

With the characterisations of potentially habitable planetary atmospheres on the horizon, the search for biosignatures is set to become a major area of research in the coming decades. To understand the atmospheric characteristics that might…

Evolutionary transitions among ecological interactions are widely known, although their detailed dynamics remain absent for most population models. Adaptive dynamics has been used to illustrate how the parameters of population models might…

We analyze the joint effect of contaminants and nutrient loading on population dynamics of marine food chains by means of bifurcation analysis. Contaminant toxicity is assumed to alter mortality of some species with a sigmoidal…