Related papers: Subpopulations and Stability in Microbial Communit…
Microbial communities routinely have several alternative stable states observed for the same environmental parameters. Sudden and irreversible transitions between these states make external manipulation of these systems more complicated. To…
One of the most challenging problems in microbiology is to understand how a small fraction of microbes that resists killing by antibiotics can emerge in a population of genetically identical cells, the phenomenon known as persistence or…
Understanding the stability of complex communities is a central focus in ecology, many important theoretical advancements have been made to identify drivers of ecological stability. However, previous results often rely on the…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
On a global level, ecological communities are being perturbed at an unprecedented rate by human activities and environmental instabilities. Yet, we understand little about what factors facilitate or impede long-term persistence of these…
Microorganisms live in environments that inevitably fluctuate between mild and harsh conditions. As harsh conditions may cause extinctions, the rate at which fluctuations occur can shape microbial communities and their diversity, but we…
We study macroevolutionary dynamics by extending microevolutionary competition models to long time scales. It has been shown that for a general class of competition models, gradual evolutionary change in continuous phenotypes (evolutionary…
In a wide variety of natural systems, closely-related microbial strains coexist stably, resulting in high levels of fine-scale biodiversity. However, the mechanisms that stabilize this coexistence are not fully understood. Spatial…
A central feature of complex systems is the relevance and entanglement of different levels of description. For instance, the dynamics of ecosystems can be alternatively described in terms of large ecological processes and classes of…
Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…
A key unresolved question in microbial ecology is how the extraordinary diversity of microbiomes emerges from the behaviour of individual populations. This process is driven by the cross-feeding networks that structure these communities,…
Phenotypically structured equations arise in population biology to describe the interaction of species with their environment that brings the nutrients. This interaction usually leads to selection of the fittest individuals. Models used in…
The intestinal microbiota plays important roles in digestion and resistance against entero-pathogens. As with other ecosystems, its species composition is resilient against small disturbances but strong perturbations such as antibiotics can…
We present an individual-based model of phenotypic trait evolution in two-sex populations, which includes semi-random mating of individuals of the opposite sex, natural death and intra-specific competition. By passing the number of…
Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature and come in a multitude of forms, ranging from communities dominated by a handful of species to communities containing a wide variety of metabolically distinct organisms. This huge range in…
The evolution of microbial and viral organisms often generates clonal interference, a mode of competition between genetic clades within a population. In this paper, we show that interference strongly constrains the genetic and phenotypic…
Genetically identical cells in the same population can take on phenotypically variable states, leading to differentiated responses to external signals, such as nutrients and drug-induced stress. Many models and experiments have focused on a…
In this work, we provide an asymptotic analysis of the solutions to an elliptic integro-differential equation. This equation describes the evolutionary equilibria of a phenotypically structured population, subject to selection, mutation,…