Related papers: Bacterial cartels at steady supply
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
Using game theory we provide mathematical proof that if a species of asexually reproducing microbes does not possess maximum variability in competitive abilities amongst its individual organisms, then that species is vulnerable to…
Bacteria are highly adaptive microorganisms that thrive in a wide range of growth conditions via changes in cell morphologies and macromolecular composition. How bacterial morphologies are regulated in diverse environmental conditions is a…
Personalized models of the gut microbiome are valuable for disease prevention and treatment. For this, one requires a mathematical model that predicts microbial community composition and the emergent behavior of microbial communities. We…
We consider the logistic metapopulation model over a stream network and use the metapopulation growth rate and the total biomass (of the positive equilibrium) as metrics for different aspects of population persistence. Our objective is to…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
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…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
We study the scheduling problem of a self-replicating factory. We show that by maintaining a sufficiently large inventory of intermediate metabolites and catalysts required for self-replication, optimal replication times can be achieved by…
It has long been known that antibiotic treatment will not completely kill off a bacteria population. For many species a small fraction of bacteria is not sensitive to antibiotics. These bacteria are said to persist. Recently it has been…
Immotile microbes inhabit nearly every environment on Earth, from soils and sediments to food matrices -- yet how they disperse through these physically confining environments is poorly understood. Here, we show that immotile microbial…
In evolutionary dynamics, well-mixed populations are almost always associated with all-to-all interactions; mathematical models are based on complete graphs. In most cases, these models do not predict fixation probabilities in groups of…
Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…
We propose a general parametrizable model to capture the dynamic interaction among bacteria in the formation of micro-colonies. micro-colonies represent the first social step towards the formation of structured multicellular communities…
Our earlier work in \cite{nguyen2022population} shows that concentrating the resources on the upstream end tends to maximize the total biomass in a metapopulation model for a stream species. In this paper, we continue our research direction…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
The intestinal microbiota plays important roles in digestion and resistance against entero-pathogens. As with other ecosystems, its species composition is resilient against small disturbances but strong perturbations such as antibiotics can…
Bacterial chemotaxis systems are as diverse as the environments that bacteria inhabit, but how much environmental variation can cells tolerate with a single system? Diversification of a single chemotaxis system could serve as an…
Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…
All life, including cells and artificial protocells, must integrate diverse molecules into a single unit in order to reproduce. Despite expected pressure to evolve a simple system with the fastest replication speed, the mechanism by which…