Related papers: Suppressing evolution through environmental switch…
Environmental variation can play an important role in ecological competition by influencing the relative advantage between competing species. Here, we consider such effects by extending a classical, competitive Moran model to incorporate an…
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 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…
The design of protocols to suppress the propagation of viral infections is an enduring enterprise, especially hindered by limited knowledge of the mechanisms through which extinction of infection propagation comes about. We here report on a…
Whether evolution can be predicted is a key question in evolutionary biology. Here we set out to better understand the repeatability of evolution. We explored experimentally the effect of mutation supply and the strength of selective…
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 protocols - using substances such as antibiotics or disinfectants - remain the preferred option for preventing the spread of pathogenic bacteria. However, bacteria can develop mechanisms to reduce their antimicrobial…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
Many types of bacteria can survive under stress by switching stochastically between two different phenotypes: the "normals" who multiply fast, but are vulnerable to stress, and the "persisters" who hardly multiply, but are resilient to…
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…
We conducted an investigation of the effect that extreme variability of the individual's environment has in the individual's adaptability and, in general, in the co-evolution of a population. First we assume that the individuals are a kind…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
Bacterial resistance to antibiotic treatment is a huge concern: introduction of any new antibiotic is shortly followed by the emergence of resistant bacterial isolates in the clinic. This issue is compounded by a severe lack of new…
Effects of externally imposed periodic changes in the environment on population dynamics are studied with the help of a simple model. The environmental changes are represented by the temporal and spatial dependence of the competition terms…
Antibiotic resistance presents a growing global health threat by diminishing the effectiveness of treatments and allowing once-manageable bacterial infections to persist. This study develops and analyzes an optimization-based mathematical…
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…
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,…
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 study the evolutionary dynamics of a phenotypically structured population in a changing environment , where the environmental conditions vary with a linear trend but in an oscillatory manner. Such phenomena can be described by parabolic…