Related papers: Evolution of chemotactic hitchhiking
Mathematical models have been widely used to describe the collective movement of bacteria by chemotaxis. In particular, bacterial concentration waves traveling in a narrow channel have been experimentally observed and can be precisely…
While bacterial swimming has been well characterized in uniform liquid environments, only little is known about how bacteria propagate through complex environments, such as gel-like matrices or porous media that are typically encountered in…
We present a two-species population model in a well-mixed environment where the dynamics involves, in addition to birth and death, changes due to environmental factors and inter-species interactions. The novel dynamical components are…
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…
One approach to quantifying biological diversity consists of characterizing the statistical distribution of specific properties of a taxonomic group or habitat. Microorganisms living in fluid environments, and for whom motility is key,…
We study an individual-based model in which two spatially-distributed species, characterized by different diffusivities, compete for resources. We consider three different ecological settings. In the first, diffusing faster has a cost in…
How producers of public goods persist in microbial communities is a major question in evolutionary biology. Cooperation is evolutionarily unstable, since cheating strains can reproduce quicker and take over. Spatial structure has been shown…
In biology and ecology, individuals or communities of individuals living in unpredictable environments often alternate between different evolutionary strategies to spread and reduce risks. Such behavior is commonly referred to as…
Viruses like influenza have long coevolved with host immune systems, gradually shaping the evolutionary trajectory of these pathogens. Host immune systems develop immunity against circulating strains, which in turn avoid extinction by…
We propose an alternative mechanism for intracellular cargo transport which results from motor induced longitudinal fluctuations of cytoskeletal microtubules (MT). The longitudinal fluctuations combined with transient cargo binding to the…
Most cells possess the capacity to locomote. Alone or collectively, this allows them to adapt, to rearrange, and to explore their surroundings. The biophysical characterization of such motile processes, in health and disease, has so far…
Many motile biological cells navigate along concentration gradients of signaling molecules: This chemotaxis guides for instance sperm cells from marine invertebrates, which have to find egg cells in the ocean. While chemotaxis has been…
We present a simple model that describes the motion of a single chemotactic cell exposed to a traveling wave of the chemoattractant. The model incorporates two types of responses to stimulation by the chemoattractant, i.e., change in…
Much research has focused on the deleterious effects of free-riding in public goods games, and a variety of mechanisms that suppresses cheating behaviour. Here we argue that under certain conditions cheating behaviour can be beneficial to…
A simple model is studied for the chemotactic movement of biological cells in the presence of a periodic chemical wave. It incorporates the feature of adaptation that may play an important role in allowing for ``rectified" chemotaxis:…
Bacterial populations in natural conditions are expected to experience stochastic environmental fluctuations, and in addition, environments are affected by bacterial activities since they consume substrates and excrete various chemicals. We…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
Organisms that exploit different environments may experience a stochastic delay in adjusting their fitness when they switch habitats. We study two species whose fitness is determined by the species composition of the local environment, as…
The motility of a fish keratocyte on a flat substrate exhibits two distinct regimes: the non-migrating and the migrating one. In both configurations the shape is fixed in time and, when the cell is moving, the velocity is constant in…
Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming towards or away from the stimulus source; they do so by adapting their tactic signal transduction pathways to the environment. Their self-motility thus…