Related papers: Bacterial cartels at steady supply
Competition indices are models frequently used in ecology to account for the impact of density and resource distribution on the growth of a plant population. They allow to define simple individual-based models, by integrating information…
Cellular metabolism, the integrated interconversion of thousands of metabolic substrates through enzyme-catalyzed biochemical reactions, is the most investigated complex intercellular web of molecular interactions. While the topological…
Coevolutionary dynamics is investigated in chemical catalysis, biological evolution, social and economic systems. The dynamics of these systems can be analyzed within the unifying framework of evolutionary game theory. In this Letter, we…
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…
Flux analysis is a class of constraint-based approaches to the study of biochemical reaction networks: they are based on determining the reaction flux configurations compatible with given stoichiometric and thermodynamic constraints. One of…
We revisit the modeling of the diauxic growth of a pure microorganism on two distinct sugars which was first described by Monod. Most available models are deterministic and make the assumption that all cells of the microbial ecosystem…
Here, we study the evolution of specialization using realistic computer simulations of bacteria that secrete two public goods in a dynamic fluid. Through this first principles approach, we find physical factors such as diffusion, flow…
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…
Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same…
Species or population that proliferate faster than others become dominant in numbers. Catalysis allows catalytic sets within a molecular reaction network to dominate the non catalytic parts of the network by processing most of the available…
Consider a species whose population density solves the steady diffusive logistic equation in a heterogeneous environment modeled with the help of a spatially non constant coefficient standing for a resources distribution in a given box. We…
The dynamics of growth of bacterial populations has been extensively studied for planktonic cells in well-agitated liquid culture, in which all cells have equal access to nutrients. In the real world, bacteria are more likely to live in…
When microbes compete for limited resources, they often engage in chemical warfare using bacterial toxins. This competition can be understood in terms of evolutionary game theory (EGT). We study the predictions of EGT for the bacterial…
The survival and proliferation of cells and organisms require a highly coordinated allocation of cellular resources to ensure the efficient synthesis of cellular components. In particular, the total enzymatic capacity for cellular…
Which properties of metabolic networks can be derived solely from stoichiometric information about the network's constituent reactions? Predictive results have been obtained by Flux Balance Analysis (FBA), by postulating that cells set…
High-throughput sequencing techniques such as metagenomic and metatranscriptomic technologies allow cataloging of functional characteristics of microbial community members as well as their taxonomic identity. Such studies have found that a…
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…
Quantifying the action of antibiotics on biofilms is essential to devise therapies against chronic infections. Biofilms are bacterial communities attached to moist surfaces, sheltered from external aggressions by a polymeric matrix.…
We investigate the stability properties of two different classes of metabolic cycles using a combination of analytical and computational methods. Using principles from structural kinetic modeling (SKM), we show that the stability of…
Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between…