Related papers: Is there an infant mortality in bacteria?
The mechanism of bacterial cell size control has been a mystery for decades, which involves the well-coordinated growth and division in the cell cycle. The revolutionary modern techniques of microfluidics and the advanced live imaging…
The field of active matter explores the behaviors of self propelled agents out of equilibrium, with active suspensions, such as swimming bacteria in solutions, serving as impactful models. These systems exhibit spatio-temporal patterns akin…
Individual-based models of chemical or biological dynamics usually consider individual entities diffusing in space and performing a birth-death type dynamics. In this work we study the properties of a model in this class where the birth…
Causal inference is best understood using potential outcomes. This use is particularly important in more complex settings, that is, observational studies or randomized experiments with complications such as noncompliance. The topic of this…
The effects of stochastic absorption and ejection of molecules by growing droplets have been considered. Both analytical and numerical approaches have been used. They demonstrate the satisfactory coincidence. It is proved that in general…
We study the transport of bacteria in a porous media modeled by a square channel containing one cylindrical obstacle via molecular dynamics simulations coupled to a lattice Boltzmann fluid. Our bacteria model is a rod-shaped rigid body…
Cell division times in microbial populations display significant fluctuations, that impact the population growth rate in a non-trivial way. If fluctuations are uncorrelated among different cells, the population growth rate is predicted by…
In a study of the heterogeneity in malaria infection rates among children Smith et al.1 fitted several mathematical models to data from community studies in Africa. They concluded that 20% of children receive 80% of infections, that…
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 how the causal effect of a treatment evolves over time, including the potential for waning, is important for informed decisions on treatment discontinuation or repetition. For example, waning vaccine protection influences…
We study the probabilistic evolution of a birth and death continuous time measure-valued process with mutations and ecological interactions. The individuals are characterized by (phenotypic) traits that take values in a compact metric…
Birth-death processes (BDPs) are continuous-time Markov chains that track the number of "particles" in a system over time. While widely used in population biology, genetics and ecology, statistical inference of the instantaneous particle…
Epidemiologic studies and clinical trials with a survival outcome are often challenged by immortal time (IMT), a period of follow-up during which the survival outcome cannot occur because of the observed later treatment initiation. It has…
The mortality rate of many complex multicellular organisms increase with age, which suggests that net aging damage is accumulative, despite remodeling processes. But how exactly do little mishaps in the cellular level accumulate and spread…
Although the motility of the flagellated bacteria, Escherichia coli, has been widely studied, the effect of viscosity on swimming speed remains controversial. The swimming mode of wild-type E.coli is often idealized as a "run-and- tumble"…
Does bearing children shorten a woman's life expectancy? Several demographic studies, historic and current, have found no such effect. But the Caerphilly cohort study is far the most prominent and frequently-cited, and it answers in the…
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…
Reliable mortality estimates at the subnational level are essential in the study of health inequalities within a country. One of the difficulties in producing such estimates is the presence of small populations, where the stochastic…
Motile bacteria are known to accumulate at surfaces, eventually leading to changes in bacterial motility and bio-film formation. We use a novel two-colour, three-dimensional Lagrangian tracking technique, to follow simultaneously the body…
A recent cohort study revealed a positive correlate between major structural birth defects in infants and a certain medication taken by pregnant women. To draw valid causal inference, an outstanding problem to overcome was the missing birth…