Related papers: Paradoxes in Leaky Microbial Trade

Understanding why strains with different metabolic pathways that compete for a single limiting resource coexist is a challenging issue within a theoretical perspective. Previous investigations rely on mechanisms such as group or spatial…

We present a two-species population model in a well-mixed environment where the dynamics involves, in addition to birth and death, changes due to environmental factors and inter-species interactions. The novel dynamical components are…

Many of the chemical reactions that take place within a living cell are irreversible. Due to evolutionary pressures, the number of allowable reactions within these systems are highly constrained and thus the resulting metabolic networks…

A classic problem in metabolism is that fast-proliferating cells use seemingly wasteful fermentation for energy biogenesis in the presence of sufficient oxygen. This counterintuitive phenomenon, known as overflow metabolism or the Warburg…

Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…

Intercellular exchange networks are essential for the adaptive capabilities of populations of cells. While diffusional exchanges have traditionally been difficult to map, recent advances in nanotechnology enable precise probing of exchange…

There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…

Cancer cells are often seen to prefer glycolytic metabolism over oxidative phosphorylation even in the presence of oxygen-a phenomenon termed the Warburg effect. Despite significant strides in the decades since its discovery, a clear basis…

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…

Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…

Biological systems are promising substrates for computation because they naturally process environmental information through complex internal dynamics. In this study, we investigate whether bacterial metabolic models can act as physical…

Production of energy (metabolism) and its distribution is vital for living organisms, both at individual level - between different functions of an organism, as well as between species of communities at different organizational levels,…

Species interactions through cross-feeding via leakage and uptake of chemicals are important in microbial communities, and play an essential role in the coexistence of diverse species. Here, we study a simple dynamical model of a microbial…

Production of chemicals from engineered organisms in a batch culture involves an inherent trade-off between productivity, yield, and titer. Existing strategies for strain design typically focus on designing mutations that achieve the…

Bacteria possess diverse mechanisms to regulate their motility in response to environmental and physiological signals, enabling them to navigate complex habitats and adapt their behavior. Among these mechanisms, interspecies recognition…

We study the performance of general dynamic matching models. This model is defined by a connected graph, where nodes represent the class of items and the edges the compatibilities between items. Items of different classes arrive one by one…

The solution space of genome-scale models of cellular metabolism provides a map between physically viable flux configurations and cellular metabolic phenotypes described, at the most basic level, by the corresponding growth rates. By…

Standard game theory cannot describe microbial interactions mediated by diffusible molecules. Nevertheless, we show that one can still model microbial dynamics using game theory with parameters renormalized by diffusion. Contrary to…

Stochastic phenotype switching has been suggested to play a beneficial role in microbial populations by leading to the division of labour among cells, or ensuring that at least some of the population survives an unexpected change in…

We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…