Related papers: Gut microbiome composition: back to baseline?
Bacterial assemblies exhibit rich collective behaviors that control their biological functions, making them a relevant object of study from an active matter physics perspective. Dense bacterial suspensions self-organize into distinct…
Phages use bacterial host resources to replicate, intrinsically linking phage and host survival. To understand phage dynamics, it is essential to understand phage-host ecology. A key step in this ecology is infection of bacterial hosts.…
The rise and spread of antibiotic resistance causes worsening medical cost and mortality especially for life-threatening bacteria infections, thereby posing a major threat to global health. Prescribing behavior of physicians is one of the…
The explosion in known microbial diversity in the last two decades has made it abundantly clear that microbes in the environment do not exist in isolation; they are members of communities. Accordingly, omics approaches such as metagenomics…
Understanding the phase behavior of mixtures with many components is important in many contexts, including as a key step toward a physics-based description of intracellular compartmentalization. Here, we study the instabilities of a mixture…
Ecosystems tend to fluctuate around stable equilibria in response to internal dynamics and environmental factors. Occasionally, they enter an unstable tipping region and collapse into an alternative stable state. Our understanding of how…
Our view of the microbial world and its impact on human health is changing radically with the ability to sequence uncultured or unculturable microbes sampled directly from their habitats, ability made possible by fast and cheap next…
The lack of rapid antibiotic susceptibility tests adversely affects the treatment of bacterial infections and contributes to increased prevalence of multidrug resistant bacteria. Here, we describe an all-electrical approach that allows for…
In this article, we analyze a system modeling bacteriophage treatments for infections in a noisy context. In the small noise regime, we show that after a reasonable amount of time the system is close to a sane equilibrium (which is a…
In vaccine studies, investigators are often interested in studying effect modifiers of clinical treatment efficacy by biomarker-based principal strata, which is useful for selecting biomarker study endpoints for evaluating treatments in new…
Motile cells often explore natural environments characterized by a high degree of structural complexity. Moreover cell motility is also intrinsically noisy due to spontaneous random reorientation and speed fluctuations. This interplay of…
Bacteria live in environments that are continuously fluctuating and changing. Exploiting any predictability of such fluctuations can lead to an increased fitness. On longer timescales bacteria can "learn" the structure of these fluctuations…
Due to the aging of the world population and westernization of lifestyles, the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) is rapidly rising and is expected to put a strong…
Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…
Nutrient gradients and limitations play a pivotal role in the life of all microbes, both in their natural habitat as well as in artificial, microfluidic systems. Spatial concentration gradients of nutrients in densely packed cell…
Bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics by a multitude of mechanisms. A central, yet unsolved question is how resistance evolution affects cell growth at different drug levels. Here we develop a fitness model that predicts growth rates of…
In contrast to the many theoretical studies on the transmission of human-mosquitoes malaria infection, few studies have considered a multiple structure model formulations including (i) the chronological age of humans and mosquitoes…
Bacterial colonies are a well-known example of living active matter, exhibiting collective behaviors such as nematic alignment and collective motion that play an important role in the spread of microbial infections. While the underlying…
Microtubules are stiff filamentary proteins that constitute an important component of the cytoskeleton of cells. These are known to exhibit a dynamic instability. A steadily growing microtubule can suddenly start depolymerizing very…
Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…