Related papers: Habitat transition in the evolution of bacteria an…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
Bacteria possess diverse mechanisms to regulate their motility in response to environmental and physiological signals, enabling them to navigate complex habitats and adapt their behavior. Among these mechanisms, interspecies recognition…
Bacteria and archaea have evolved an adaptive, heritable immune system that recognizes and protects against viruses or plasmids. This system, known as the CRISPR-Cas system, allows the host to recognize and incorporate short foreign DNA or…
Migration between different habitats is ubiquitous among biological populations. In this Letter, we study a simple quasispecies model for evolution in two different habitats, with different fitness landscapes, coupled through one-way…
There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…
Bacterial chemotaxis systems are as diverse as the environments that bacteria inhabit, but how much environmental variation can cells tolerate with a single system? Diversification of a single chemotaxis system could serve as an…
Microbes thrive in diverse porous environments -- from soil and riverbeds to human lungs and cancer tissues -- spanning multiple scales and conditions. Short- to long-term fluctuations in local factors induce spatio-temporal…
How adaptive evolution to one environmental stress improves or suppresses adaptation to another is an important problem in evolutionary biology. For instance, in microbiology, the evolution of bacteria to be resistant to different…
Statistical physics can describe the behavior of microbial populations consisting of many heterogeneous individuals. A direct consequence is the existence of phase transitions, where the behavior of a population changes discontinuously upon…
Mixed microbial communities, usually composed of various bacterial and fungal species, are fundamental in a plethora of environments, from soil to human gut and skin. Their evolution is a paradigmatic example of intertwined dynamics, where…
We present a two-species population model in a well-mixed environment where the dynamics involves, in addition to birth and death, changes due to environmental factors and inter-species interactions. The novel dynamical components are…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…
Rapid anthropogenic environmental changes, including those due to habitat contamination, degradation, and climate change, have far-reaching effects on biological systems that may outpace animals' adaptive responses (Radchuk et al., 2019).…
Bacteriophages are viruses infecting bacteria and archaea. Many phage species cause infections which lead to the certain death of the infected prokaryotic host cell and the release of a large batch of phage progeny, yet they have been able…
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…
Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…
The dynamic nature of life's ability to thrive in diverse and changing planetary environments suggests that habitability and survival depend on the evolutionary path and life adaptation to environmental conditions. Here we explore such…
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…