Related papers: Spatial dynamics of synthetic microbial hypercycle…

Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…

Spatial patterning and synchronization are pervasive features of plankton communities, yet the mechanisms that allow such patterns to persist coherently under environmental noise remain unresolved. In vertically structured aquatic…

Phenotypic heterogeneity is a strategy commonly used by bacteria to rapidly adapt to changing environmental conditions. Here, we study the interplay between phenotypic heterogeneity and genetic diversity in spatially extended populations.…

Explaining the wide range of dynamics observed in ecological communities is challenging due to the large number of species involved, the complex network of interactions among them, and the influence of multiple environmental variables.…

Bacterial colonies growing on surfaces are shaped by mechanical stresses transmitted through the community, governed by the balance between cell growth and steric and cell-substrate interactions. Using overdamped dynamics simulations of…

It has long been hypothesized that operating close to the critical state is beneficial for natural and artificial systems. We test this hypothesis by evolving foraging agents controlled by neural networks that can change the system's…

We present a novel model that describes the within-host evolutionary dynamics of parasites undergoing antigenic variation. The approach uses a multi-type branching process with two types of entities defined according to their relationship…

Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…

We investigate how the pattern of contacts between species in mutualistic ecosystems is affected by the phylogenetic proximity between the species of each guild. We develop a dynamical model geared to establish the role of such proximity in…

We model an enclosed system of bacteria, whose motility-induced phase separation is coupled to slow population dynamics. Without noise, the system shows both static phase separation and a limit cycle, in which a rising global population…

We live in a time where climate models predict future increases in environmental variability and biological invasions are becoming increasingly frequent. A key to developing effective responses to biological invasions in increasingly…

Stochastic dynamical systems arise naturally across nearly all areas of science and engineering. Typically, a dynamical system model is based on some prior knowledge about the underlying dynamics of interest in which probabilistic features…

Dispersal of species is a fundamental ecological process in the evolution and maintenance of biodiversity. Limited control over ecological parameters has hindered progress in understanding of what enables species to colonise new area, as…

Path planning in dynamic environments is essential to high-risk applications such as unmanned aerial vehicles, self-driving cars, and autonomous underwater vehicles. In this paper, we generate collision-free trajectories for a robot within…

Self-assembly processes in biological and synthetic biomolecular systems are often governed by the spatial separation of biochemical processes. While previous work has focused on optimizing self-assembly through fine-tuned reaction…

How adaptive evolution to one environmental stress improves or suppresses adaptation to another is an important problem in evolutionary biology. For instance, in microbiology, the evolution of bacteria to be resistant to different…

We present a mathematical model based on a system of partial differential equations (PDEs) with cross-diffusion and reaction terms to describe ecological interactions between multiple bacterial species and substrates within microaggregates,…

Natural ecosystems, in particular on the microbial scale, are inhabited by a large number of species. The population size of each species is affected by interactions of individuals with each other and by spatial and temporal changes in…

Viral kinetics have been extensively studied in the past through the use of spatially well-mixed ordinary differential equations describing the time evolution of the diseased state. However, emerging spatial structures such as localized…

Mutualistic networks have attracted increasing attention in the ecological literature in the last decades as they play a key role in the maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we develop an analytical framework to study the structural stability…