Related papers: Multistability and regime shifts in microbial comm…

Bacteria regulate their motility through a variety of mechanisms, including quorum sensing (QS) and other density-dependent responses mediated by diffusible signals. While nonlinear density-dependent motility is well known in active-matter…

We investigate the competition dynamics of two microbial or viral strains that live in an environment that switches periodically between two states. One of the strains is adapted to the long-term environment, but pays a short-term cost,…

Across plant communities worldwide, fire regimes reflect a combination of climatic factors and plant characteristics. To shed new light on the complex relationships between plant characteristics and fire regimes, we developed a new…

Motility is an essential factor for an organism's survival and diversification. With the advent of novel single-cell technologies, analytical frameworks and theoretical methods, we can begin to probe the complex lives of microscopic motile…

To effectively forage in natural environments, organisms must adapt to changes in the quality and yield of food sources across multiple timescales. Individuals foraging in groups act based on both their private observations and the opinions…

Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…

All life, including cells and artificial protocells, must integrate diverse molecules into a single unit in order to reproduce. Despite expected pressure to evolve a simple system with the fastest replication speed, the mechanism by which…

We propose a minimal off-lattice model of living organisms where just a very few dynamical rules of growth are assumed. The stable coexistence of many clusters is detected when we replace the global restriction rule by a locally applied…

Many species of microbes cooperate by producing public goods from which they collectively benefit. However, these populations are under the risk of being taken over by cheating mutants that do not contribute to the pool of public goods.…

Recent studies show that the microbial communities inhabiting the human intestine can have profound impact on our well-being and health. However, we have limited understanding of the mechanisms that control this complex ecosystem. Based on…

One of the most challenging issues of evolutionary biology concerns speciation, the emergence of new species from an initial one. The huge amount of species found in nature demands a simple and robust mechanism. Yet, no consensus has been…

Diverse communities of competing species are generally characterized by substantial niche overlap and strongly stochastic dynamics. Abundance fluctuations are proportional to population size, so the dynamics of rare populations is slower.…

Complex microbial habitats see the spatial competition of different clonal bacterial populations that switch between different phenotypes. Here, we determine the effect of this subpopulation structure on the invasion of one species by…

Cooperative interactions pervade in a broad range of many-body populations, such as ecological communities, social organizations, and economic webs. We investigate the dynamics of a population of two equivalent species A and B that are…

We present a mean field model for the phase diagram of a community of micro-organisms, interacting through their metabolism so that they are, in effect, engaging in a cooperative social game. We show that as a function of the concentration…

The equilibrium behavior of binary mixtures can be understood through the competition of energy scales, which classifies their corresponding phase diagrams into distinct topological regimes (Types I-IV). However, in many soft-matter…

This paper studies a two microbial species model in competition for a single resource in the chemostat including general interspecific density-dependent growth rates with distinct removal rates for each species. We give the necessary and…

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…

Marine microorganisms often reach high swimming speeds, either to take advantage of evanescent nutrient patches or to beat Brownian forces. Since this implies that a sizable part of their energetic budget must be allocated to motion, it is…

Recent advances in metagenomics have revealed macroecological patterns or "laws" describing robust statistical regularities across microbial communities. Stochastic logistic models (SLMs), which treat species as independent -- akin to ideal…