Related papers: Paradoxes in Leaky Microbial Trade
Exchange of biochemical substances is essential way in establishing communication between bacterial cells. It is noticeable that all phases of the process are heavily influenced by perturbations of either internal or external parameters.…
When cells measure concentrations of chemical signals, they may average multiple measurements over time in order to reduce noise in their measurements. However, when cells are in a environment that changes over time, past measurements may…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
Quantitative single cell measurements have shown that cell cycle duration (the time between cell divisions) for diverse cell types is a noisy variable. The underlying distribution is mean scalable with a universal shape for many cell types…
During development, highly ordered structures emerge as cells collectively coordinate with each other. While recent advances have clarified how individual cells process and respond to external signals, understanding collective cellular…
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…
The dynamics of many microbial ecosystems are driven by cross-feeding interactions, in which metabolites excreted by some species are metabolised further by others. The population dynamics of such ecosystems are governed by…
The self-organization of microbial ecosystems involves a large variety of mechanisms, ranging from biochemical signaling to population dynamics. Among these, the role of motility regulation has been little studied, despite the importance of…
The metabolic network plays a crucial role in regulating bacterial metabolism and growth, but it is subject to inherent molecular stochasticity. Previous studies have utilized flux balance analysis and the maximum entropy method to predict…
[Background] Several studies have mentioned network modularity -- that a network can easily be decomposed into subgraphs that are densely connected within and weakly connected between each other -- as a factor affecting metabolic…
Accurately determining and classifying the structure of complex networks is the focus of much current research. One class of network of particular interest are metabolic pathways, which have previously been studied from a graph theoretical…
If one isolated species (corporation) is supposed to evolve following the logistic mapping, then we are tempted to think that the dynamics of two species (corporations) can be expressed by a coupled system of two discrete logistic…
Bacteriophages are central to microbial ecosystems for balancing bacterial populations and promoting evolution by applying strong selection pressure. Here we review some of the known aspects that modulate phage-bacteria interaction in a way…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
The evolution of multicellularity was a major transition in the history of life on earth. Conditions under which multicellularity is favored have been studied theoretically and experimentally. But since the construction of a multicellular…
A key unresolved question in microbial ecology is how the extraordinary diversity of microbiomes emerges from the behaviour of individual populations. This process is driven by the cross-feeding networks that structure these communities,…
The possibility of exploiting multiple resources is usually regarded as positive from both the economic and the environmental point of view. However, resource switching may also lead to unsustainable growth and, ultimately, to an…
We investigate the effect of cooperative interactions in an ensemble of microorganisms, modelled as self-propelled disk-like and rod-like particles, in a three-dimensional turbulent flow to show flocking as an emergent phenomenon. Building…
The "friendship paradox" (Feld1991) refers to the fact that, on average, people have strictly fewer friends than their friends have. I show that this over-sampling of the most popular people amplifies behaviors that involve…
The managed-metabolism hypothesis suggests that a cooperation barrier must be overcome if self-producing chemical organizations are to transition from non-life to life. This barrier prevents un-managed, self-organizing, autocatalytic…