Related papers: Optimal metabolic strategies for microbial growth …

Despite major environmental and genetic differences, microbial metabolic networks are known to generate consistent physiological outcomes across vastly different organisms. This remarkable robustness suggests that, at least in bacteria,…

The growth rate of organisms depends both on external conditions and on internal states, such as the expression levels of various genes. We show that to achieve a criterion mean growth rate over an ensemble of conditions, the internal…

Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…

Experimentalists have observed phenotypic variability in isogenic bacteria populations. We explore the hypothesis that in fluctuating environments this variability is tuned to maximize a bacterium's expected log growth rate, potentially…

Organisms that grow and survive in uncertain environments may need to change their physiological state as the environment changes. When the environment is uncertain, one strategy known as bet-hedging is to make these changes randomly and…

High-throughput experimental techniques and bioinformatics tools make it possible to obtain reconstructions of the metabolism of microbial species. Combined with mathematical frameworks such as flux balance analysis, which assumes that…

Natural selection has shaped the evolution of cells and multi-cellular organisms such that social cooperation can often be preferred over an individualistic approach to metabolic regulation. This paper extends a framework for dynamic…

Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…

Metagenomics has revealed hundreds of bacterial species in almost all microbiota. In a few well-studied cases, bacterial communities have been observed to coordinate their metabolic fluxes. In principle, bacteria can divide tasks to reap…

Heterogeneous systems of active matter exhibit a range of complex emergent dynamical patterns. In particular, it is difficult to predict the properties of the mixed system based on its constituents. These considerations are particularly…

Every interaction of a living organism with its environment involves the placement of a bet. Armed with partial knowledge about a stochastic world, the organism must decide its next step or near-term strategy, an act that implicitly or…

The regulation of metabolic activity by tuning enzyme expression levels is crucial to sustain cellular growth in changing environments. Metabolic networks are often studied at steady state using constraint-based models and optimization…

We revisit the modeling of the diauxic growth of a pure microorganism on two distinct sugars which was first described by Monod. Most available models are deterministic and make the assumption that all cells of the microbial ecosystem…

Experimental and empirical observations on cell metabolism cannot be understood as a whole without their integration into a consistent systematic framework. However, the characterization of metabolic flux phenotypes is typically reduced to…

Organisms have evolved a variety of mechanisms to cope with the unpredictability of environmental conditions, and yet mainstream models of metabolic regulation are typically based on strict optimality principles that do not account for…

Collective action and group formation are fundamental behaviors among both organisms cooperating to maximize their fitness, and people forming socioeconomic organizations. Researchers have extensively explored social interaction structures…

We study the average asymptotic growth rate of cells in randomly fluctuating environments, with multiple viable phenotypes per environment. We show that any information processing strategy has an asymptotic growth rate, which is the sum of:…

Risk spreading in bacterial populations is generally regarded as a strategy to maximize survival. Here, we study its role during range expansion of a genetically diverse population where growth and motility are two alternative traits. We…

Consider a species whose population density solves the steady diffusive logistic equation in a heterogeneous environment modeled with the help of a spatially non constant coefficient standing for a resources distribution in a given box. We…

Phase variation, or stochastic switching between alternative states of gene expression, is common among microbes, and may be important in coping with changing environments. We use a theoretical model to assess whether such switching is a…