Related papers: Competing metabolic strategies in a multilevel sel…
The interaction networks of biological systems are known to take on several non-random structural properties, some of which are believed to positively influence system robustness. Researchers are only starting to understand how these…
This paper investigates the competition of two species in a heterogeneous environment subject to the effect of harvesting. The most realistic harvesting case is connected with the intrinsic growth rate, and the harvesting functions are…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
We present a simple model of adaptive radiations in evolution based on species competition. Competition is found to promote species divergence and branching, and to dampen the net species production. In the model simulations, high taxonomic…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
The persistence of biodiversity of species is a challenging proposition in ecological communities in the face of Darwinian selection. The present article investigates beyond the pairwise competitive interactions and provides a novel…
Efficient search acts as a strong selective force in biological systems ranging from cellular populations to predator-prey systems. The search processes commonly involve finding a stationary or mobile target within a heterogeneously…
Organisms that exploit different environments may experience a stochastic delay in adjusting their fitness when they switch habitats. We study two species whose fitness is determined by the species composition of the local environment, as…
The problem of unicellular-multicellular transition is one of the main issues that is discussing in evolutionary biology. In [1] the fitness of a colony of cells is considered in terms of its two basic components, viability and fecundity.…
This paper develops a quasispecies model where cells can adopt a two-cell survival strategy. Within this strategy, pairs of cells join together, at which point one of the cells sacrifices its own replicative ability for the sake of the…
In order to grow in any given environment, bacteria need to collect information about the medium composition and implement suitable growth strategies by adjusting their regulatory and metabolic degrees of freedom. In the standard sense,…
We analyze the long term behavior of interacting populations which can be controlled through harvesting. The dynamics is assumed to be discrete in time and stochastic due to the effect of environmental fluctuations. We present extinction…
A fundamental question in the conjunction of information theory, biophysics, bioinformatics and thermodynamics relates to the principles and processes that guide the development of natural intelligence in natural environments where…
During overflow metabolism, cells excrete glycolytic byproducts when growing under aerobic conditions in a seemingly wasteful fashion. While potentially advantageous for microbes with finite oxidative capacity, its role in higher organisms…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
Asymmetric segregation of key proteins at cell division -- be it a beneficial or deleterious protein -- is ubiquitous in unicellular organisms and often considered as an evolved trait to increase fitness in a stressed environment. Here, we…
In natural ecosystems, species can be characterized by the nonlinear density-dependent self-regulation of their growth profile. Species of many taxa show a substantial density-dependent reduction for low population size. Nevertheless, many…
At what level does selective pressure effectively act? When considering the reproductive dynamics of interacting and mutating agents, it has long been debated whether selection is better understood by focusing on the individual or if…
The main topic of this thesis is the analysis of evolution equations reflecting issues in ecology and population dynamics. In mathematical modelling, the impact of environmental elements and the interaction between species is read into the…