Related papers: Within-host bacterial growth dynamics with both mu…
Bacterial populations often have complex spatial structures, which can impact their evolution. Here, we study how spatial structure affects the evolution of antibiotic resistance in a bacterial population. We consider a minimal model of…
Antimicrobial resistance to drugs (AMR), a global threat to human and animal health, is often regarded as resulting from cooperative behaviour. Moreover, microbes generally evolve in volatile environments that, together with demographic…
The dynamics of epidemic spreading is often reduced to the single control parameter $R_0$, whose value, above or below unity, determines the state of the contagion. If, however, the pathogen evolves as it spreads, $R_0$ may change over…
Dispersal of species is a fundamental ecological process in the evolution and maintenance of biodiversity. Limited control over ecological parameters has hindered progress in understanding of what enables species to colonise new area, as…
Quantification of heritability is a fundamental desideratum in genetics, which allows an assessment of the contribution of additive genetic variation to the variability of a trait of interest. The traditional computational approaches for…
Antagonistic coevolution between hosts and parasites can have a major impact on host population structures, and hence on the evolution of social traits. Using stochastic modelling techniques in the context of bacteria-virus interactions, we…
Since penicillin was discovered about 90 years ago, we have become used to using drugs to eradicate unwanted pathogenic cells. However, using drugs to kill bacteria, viruses or cancer cells has the serious side effect of selecting for…
We present a model for host-parasite dynamics which incorporates both vertical and horizontal transmission as well as spatial structure. Our model consists of stacked contact processes (CP), where the dynamics of the host is a simple CP on…
How adaptive evolution to one environmental stress improves or suppresses adaptation to another is an important problem in evolutionary biology. For instance, in microbiology, the evolution of bacteria to be resistant to different…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
Bacterial growth environment strongly influences the efficacy of antibiotic treatment, with slow growth often being associated with decreased susceptibility. Yet in many cases the connection between antibiotic susceptibility and pathogen…
We introduce and discuss a kinetic framework describing the time evolution of the statistical distributions of a population divided into the compartments of susceptible, infectious, recovered, and resistant in the presence of a microbial…
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.…
Heterogeneity in physical and functional characteristics of cells (e.g. size, cycle time, growth rate, protein concentration) proliferates within an isogenic population due to stochasticity in intracellular biochemical processes and in the…
The segregation of plasmids in a bacterial population is investigated. Hereby, a dynamical model is formulated in terms of a size-structured population using a hyperbolic partial differential equation incorporating non-local terms (the…
In this paper, we first propose a diffusive pathogen infection model with general incidence rate which incorporates cell-to-cell transmission. By applying the theory of monotone dynamical systems, we prove that the model admits the global…
Nutrient limitation is one of the most common triggers of antibiotic tolerance and persistence. Here, we present two microfluidic setups to study how spatial and temporal variation in nutrient availability lead to increased survival of…
Understanding how antibiotics inhibit bacteria can help to reduce antibiotic use and hence avoid antimicrobial resistance - yet few theoretical models exist for bacterial growth inhibition by a clinically relevant antibiotic treatment…
We solve a simple model that supports a dynamic phase transition and show conditions for the existence of the transition. Using methods of large deviation theory we analytically compute the probability distribution for activity and entropy…
The spread of infectious disease and the evolution of antigenically distinct strains are often modeled separately, despite strong feedbacks mediated by host immune memory and heterogeneous contacts. To tackle this challenging problem, we…