Related papers: Functional universality in slow-growing microbial …
From a purely operational standpoint, the existence of microbes that can grow under extreme conditions, or "extremophiles", leads to the question of how the molecules making up these microbes can maintain both their structure and function.…
The process of evolution by natural selection leads to phenotypes of increasing fitness. For cellular chemical reaction networks, this means optimising a variety of fitness functions such as robustness, precision, or sensitivity to external…
Aggregation-diffusion equations are foundational tools for modelling biological aggregations. Their principal use is to link the collective movement mechanisms of organisms to their emergent space use patterns in a concrete mathematical…
The growth of complex populations, such as microbial communities, forests, and cities, occurs over vastly different spatial and temporal scales. Although research in different fields has developed detailed, system-specific models to…
We propose a general parametrizable model to capture the dynamic interaction among bacteria in the formation of micro-colonies. micro-colonies represent the first social step towards the formation of structured multicellular communities…
The dynamics of molecular collisions in a macroscopic body are encoded by the parameter Thermodynamic entropy - a statistical measure of the number of molecular configurations that correspond to a given macrostate. Directionality in the…
Cells generally convert nutrient resources to useful products via energy transduction. Accordingly, the thermodynamic efficiency of this conversion process is one of the most essential characteristics of living organisms. However, although…
Metabolism of living organisms is a foundation of life. The metabolic rate (energy production per unit time) increases slower than organisms' mass. When this phenomenon is considered across different species, it is called interspecific…
Lately, experimental research on microbial symbioses based on nutrient exchange and interdependence has yielded a number of interesting findings, however an in-depth mathematical description of the exact underlying dynamics of such…
When bacteria are grown on a mixture of two growth-limiting substrates, they exhibit a rich spectrum of substrate consumption patterns including diauxic growth, simultaneous consumption, and bistable growth. In previous work, we showed that…
Ecological modelling of increasingly more complex microbial populations is necessary to reflect the highly functional and diverse behaviour inherent to many systems found in reality. Anaerobic digestion is one such process that has…
The interactions among the constituent members of a microbial community play a major role in determining the overall behavior of the community and the abundance levels of its members. These interactions can be modeled using a network whose…
The increasing volumes of data produced by high-throughput instruments coupled with advanced computational infrastructures for scientific computing have enabled what is often called a {\em Fourth Paradigm} for scientific research based on…
Recent field investigations of photosynthetic bacteria living in geothermal hot spring environments have revealed surprisingly complex ecosystems, with an unexpected level of genetic diversity. One case of particular interest involves the…
We study the dynamics of proliferating cell collectives whose microscopic constituents' growth is inhibited by macroscopic growth-induced stress. Discrete particle simulations of a growing collective show the emergence of concentric-ring…
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…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
The capacity to sense gradients efficiently and acquire information about the ambient environment confers many advantages like facilitating movement toward nutrient sources or away from toxic chemicals. The amplified dispersal evinced by…
Deciphering the control principles of metabolism and its interaction with other cellular functions is central to biomedicine and biotechnology. Yet, understanding the efficient control of metabolic fluxes remains elusive for large-scale…
What makes living things special is how they manage matter, energy, and entropy. A general theory of organismal metabolism should therefore be quantified in these three currencies while capturing the unique way they flow between individuals…