Related papers: Population genetics in microchannels
Competition between random genetic drift and natural selection plays a central role in evolution: Whereas non-beneficial mutations often prevail in small populations by chance, mutations that sweep through large populations typically confer…
It is widely accepted that population genetics theory is the cornerstone of evolutionary analyses. Empirical tests of the theory, however, are challenging because of the complex relationships between space, dispersal, and evolution.…
Biofilms inhabit a range of environments, such as dental plaques or soil micropores, often characterized by intricate, non-even surfaces. However, the impact of surface irregularities on the population dynamics of biofilms remains elusive…
A big challenge in current biology is to understand the exact self-organization mechanism underlying complex multi-physics coupling developmental processes. With multiscale computations of from subcellular gene expressions to cell…
Isogenic Escherichia coli growing exponentially in a constant environment display large variation in growth-rates, division-sizes and generation-times. It is unclear how these seemingly random cell cycles can be reconciled with the precise…
Segregation of populations is a key question in evolution theory. One important aspect is the relation between spatial organization and the population's composition. Here we study a specific example -- sectors in expanding bacterial…
We investigate the nature of genetic drift acting at the leading edge of range expansions, building on recent results in [Hallatschek et al., Proc.\ Natl.\ Acad.\ Sci., \textbf{104}(50): 19926 - 19930 (2007)]. A well mixed population of two…
This chapter gives a synopsis of recent approaches to model and analyse the evolution of microbial populations under selection. The first part reviews two population genetic models of Lenski's long-term evolution experiment with Escherichia…
We have performed a statistical analysis of the spatial distribution of operons in the transcriptional regulation network of Escherichia coli. The analysis reveals that operons that regulate each other and operons that are coregulated tend…
We analyze evolutionary dynamics in a confluent, branching cellular population, such as in a growing duct, vasculature, or in a branching microbial colony. We focus on the coarse-grained features of the evolution and build a statistical…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
Mechanical interactions among cells in a growing microbial colony can significantly influence the colony's spatial genetic structure and, thus, evolutionary outcomes such as the fates of rare mutations. Here, we computationally investigate…
Culturing cells confined in microscale geometries has been reported in many studies this last decade, in particular following the development of microfluidic-based applications and lab-on-a-chip devices. Such studies usually examine growth…
When a biological population expands into new territory, genetic drift develops an enormous influence on evolution at the propagating front. In such range expansion processes, fluctuations in allele frequencies occur through stochastic…
Establishing a quantitative connection between the population growth rate and the generation times of single cells is a prerequisite for understanding evolutionary dynamics of microbes. However, existing theories fail to account for the…
Spatial models where growth is limited to the edge of the expansions have been instrumental to understand the population dynamics and the clone size distribution in growing cellular populations, such as microbial colonies and avascular…
The variability in cell size of an isogenic population of Escherichia coli has been widely reported in experiment. The probability density function (PDF) of cell lengths has been variously described by exponential and lognormal functions.…
Bacterial colonies are abundant on living and nonliving surfaces and are known to mediate a broad range of processes in ecology, medicine, and industry. Although extensively researched, from single cells to demographic scales, a…
The data we analyze derives from the observation of numerous cells of the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli) growing and dividing. Single cells grow and divide to give birth to two daughter cells, that in turn grow and divide. Thus, a…
Bacteria are prolific at colonizing diverse surfaces under a widerange of environmental conditions, and exhibit fascinating examples of self-organization across scales. Though it has recently attracted considerable interest, the role of…