Related papers: Spatiotemporal Self-Organization of Fluctuating Ba…

New automated and high-throughput methods allow the manipulation and selection of numerous bacterial populations. In this manuscript we are interested in the neutral diversity patterns that emerge from such a setup in which many bacterial…

Models based on surfactant driven instabilities have been employed to describe pattern formation by swarming bacteria. However, by definition, such models cannot account for the effect of bacterial sensing and decision making. Here we…

Cell tracking enables data extraction from time-lapse "cell movies" and promotes modeling biological processes at the single-cell level. We introduce a new fully automated computational strategy to track accurately cells across frames in…

We present models and computational results which indicate that the spatial and temporal regularity seen in Proteus mirabilis swarm-colony development is largely an expression of a sharp age of dedifferentiation in the cell cycle from…

Chemotaxis receptors in E. coli form clusters at the cell poles and also laterally along the cell body, and this clustering plays an important role in signal transduction. Recently, experiments using flourrescence imaging have shown that,…

We study an ecology-inspired model for a population of bounded size, whose dynamics is governed by random birth, death, and immigration events. Stochastic fluctuations in the number of individuals give rise to a succession of alternating…

Standard models of population dynamics focus on the the interaction, survival, and extinction of the competing species individually. Real ecological systems, however, are characterized by an abundance of species (or strategies, in the…

Living materials such as biological tissues or bacterial colonies are collections of heterogeneous entities of different sizes, capable of autonomous motion, and often capable of cooperating. Such a degree of complexity brings to collective…

The colonisation of a soft passive material by motile cells such as bacteria is common in biology. The resulting colonies of the invading cells are often observed to exhibit intricate patterns whose morphology and dynamics can depend on a…

Many motile microorganisms react to environmental light cues with a variety of motility responses guiding cells towards better conditions for survival and growth. The use of spatial light modulators could help to elucidate the mechanisms of…

Bacteria populations rely on mechanisms such as quorum sensing to coordinate complex tasks that cannot be achieved by a single bacterium. Quorum sensing is used to measure the local bacteria population density, and it controls cooperation…

We study non-equilibrium bacterial colony growth using a geometry-first, time-resolved analysis of morphology. From time-lapse microscopy data, we track the coupled evolution of area, perimeter, and boundary-sensitive shape descriptors…

In subdivided populations, migration acts together with selection and genetic drift and determines their evolution. Building up on a recently proposed method, which hinges on the emergence of a time scale separation between local and global…

The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…

Mechanical stresses stemming from environmental factors are a key determinant of cellular behavior and physiology. Yet, the role of self-induced biomechanical stresses in growing bacterial colonies has remained largely unexplored. Here, we…

The mechanism of bacterial cell size control has been a mystery for decades, which involves the well-coordinated growth and division in the cell cycle. The revolutionary modern techniques of microfluidics and the advanced live imaging…

Bacteriophages spreading through populations of bacteria offer relatively simple, tuneable systems for testing mathematical models of range expansion. However, such models typically assume a static state into which to expand, which is not…

The existence of phenotypic heterogeneity in single-species bacterial biofilms is well-established in the published literature. However, the modeling of population dynamics in biofilms from the viewpoint of social interactions, i.e.…

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…

This study investigates the role of spatial segregation, prompted by competition avoidance, as a key mechanism for emergent coexistence within microbial communities. Recognizing these communities as complex adaptive systems, we challenge…