Related papers: Paradoxes in Leaky Microbial Trade

The metabolic state of a cell, comprising fluxes, metabolite concentrations and enzyme levels, is shaped by a compromise between metabolic benefit and enzyme cost. This hypothesis and its consequences can be studied by computational models…

The relationship between the dynamics of a community and its constituent pairwise interactions is a fundamental problem in ecology. Higher-order ecological effects beyond pairwise interactions may be key to complex ecosystems, but…

Cell reproduction involves replication of diverse molecule species, in contrast to simple replication system with fewer components. Here, we address why such diversity is sustained despite the efficiency of simple replication systems, using…

Social dilemmas are an integral part of social interactions. Cooperative actions, ranging from secreting extra-cellular products in microbial populations to donating blood in humans, are costly to the actor and hence create an incentive to…

Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…

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,…

In recent decades freshwater lakes have seen an increase in human presence. A common byproduct of this human presence is eutrophication, which readily results in harmful cyanobacteria blooms. In this work we propose a model that couples the…

We consider a simple information-theoretic model of communication, in which two species of bacteria have the option of exchanging information about their environment, thereby improving their chances of survival. For this purpose, we model a…

Microbial populations exhibit a broad spectrum of nutrient utilization strategies, ranging from strategies utilizing diverse nutrients, called "generalists," to those being highly adapted to specific nutrients, called "specialists." The…

In making models for biological systems one expects to grasp the biology and be able to use ones intuition to predict the outcome. This paper is about the discrepancy between what is expected and what is the outcome of the analysis of the…

Metabolic reactions of single-cell organisms are routinely observed to become dispensable or even incapable of carrying activity under certain circumstances. Yet, the mechanisms as well as the range of conditions and phenotypes associated…

Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…

We describe a new complex system model of an evolving production economy. This model is the simplest we can envisage which incorporates the new observation that the rate of an economic production process depends only on the minimum of its…

Photosynthetic microbes have evolved and successfully adapted to the ever-changing environmental conditions in complex microhabitats throughout almost all ecosystems on Earth. In the absence of light, they can sustain their biological…

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…

Phenotypic variation is a hallmark of cellular physiology. Metabolic heterogeneity, in particular, underpins single-cell phenomena such as microbial drug tolerance and growth variability. Much research has focussed on transcriptomic and…

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…

Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…

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…

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…