Related papers: Insular microbiogeography
Soil microbial communities are known to be robust against perturbations such as nutrition inputs, which appears as an obstacle for the soil improvement. On the other hand, its adaptable aspect has been also reported. Here we propose simple…
Biological macromolecules have complex and non-trivial energy landscapes, endowing them a unique conformational adaptability and diversity in function. Hence, understanding the processes of elasticity and dissipation at the nanoscale is…
The evolutionary transition to multicellularity transformed life on earth, allowing for the evolution of large, complex organisms. While multicellularity can be strongly advantageous, its earliest stages bring unique physical challenges.…
With the number of fully-sequenced genomes now well over a hundred it has become possible to start investigating if there are any quantitative regularities in the genetic make-up of genomes. In (physics/0307001), I originally showed that…
Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between…
It is widely accepted that population genetics theory is the cornerstone of evolutionary analyses. Empirical tests of the theory, however, are challenging because of the complex relationships between space, dispersal, and evolution.…
The relationship between microscopic observations and macroscopic behavior is a fundamental open question in biophysical systems. Here, we develop a unified approach that---in contrast with existing methods---predicts cell type from…
Evolution is the theory that plants and animals today have come from kinds that have existed in the past. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace dedicate their life to observe how species interact with their environment, grow,…
We introduce a model for the evolution of species triggered by generation of novel features and exhaustive combination with other available traits. Under the assumption that innovations are rare, we obtain a bursty branching process of…
In exponentially proliferating populations of microbes, the population typically doubles at a rate less than the average doubling time of a single-cell due to variability at the single-cell level. It is known that the distribution of…
Selection in a time-periodic environment is modeled via the continuous-time two-player replicator dynamics, which for symmetric pay-offs reduces to the Fisher equation of mathematical genetics. For a sufficiently rapid and cyclic…
Over the past decade, advances in super-resolution microscopy and particle-based modeling have driven an intense interest in investigating spatial heterogeneity at the level of single molecules in cells. Remarkably, it is becoming clear…
Continuum models for the spatial dynamics of growing cell populations have been widely used to investigate the mechanisms underpinning tissue development and tumour invasion. These models consist of nonlinear partial differential equations…
We present novel analytical results about ecosystem species diversity that stem from a proposed coarse grained neutral model based on birth-death processes. The relevance of the problem lies in the urgency for understanding and synthesizing…
In many models of genotypic evolution, the vector of genotype populations satisfies a system of linear ordinary differential equations. This system of equations models a competition between differential replication rates (fitness) and…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Mathematical modelling of the evolution of the size-spectrum dynamics in aquatic ecosystems was discovered to be a powerful tool to have a deeper insight into impacts of human- and environmental driven changes on the marine ecosystem. In…
The mean size of exponentially dividing E. coli cells cultured in different nutrient conditions is known to depend on the mean growth rate only. However, the joint fluctuations relating cell size, doubling time and individual growth rate…
The competition for resources is a defining feature of microbial communities. In many contexts, from soils to host-associated communities, highly diverse microbes are organized into metabolic groups or guilds with similar resource…
We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…