Related papers: Coupled environmental and demographic fluctuations…
Antimicrobial resistance to drugs (AMR), a global threat to human and animal health, is often regarded as resulting from cooperative behaviour. Moreover, microbes generally evolve in volatile environments that, together with demographic…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
The evolution of antimicrobial resistance can be strongly affected by variations of antimicrobial concentration. Here, we study the impact of periodic alternations of absence and presence of antimicrobial on resistance evolution in a…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
The evolution of antimicrobial resistance generally occurs in an environment where antimicrobial concentration is variable, which has dramatic consequences on the microorganisms' fitness landscape, and thus on the evolution of resistance.…
Ecology and evolution under changing environments are important in many subfields of biology with implications for medicine. Here, we explore an example: the consequences of fluctuating environments on the emergence of antibiotic…
Environmental variability greatly influences the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a population, i.e. it affects how its size and composition evolve. Here, we study a well-mixed population of finite and fluctuating size whose growth is limited…
Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem. To gain a fundamental understanding of resistance evolution, a combination of systematic experimental and theoretical approaches is required. Evolution experiments combined with…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
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…
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global threat and combating its spread is of paramount importance. AMR often results from a cooperative behaviour with shared drug protection. Microbial communities generally evolve in volatile, spatially…
Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature and come in a multitude of forms, ranging from communities dominated by a handful of species to communities containing a wide variety of metabolically distinct organisms. This huge range in…
Social dilemmas are an integral part of social interactions. Cooperative actions, ranging from secreting extra-cellular products in microbial populations to donating blood in humans, are costly to the actor and hence create an incentive to…
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…
Microorganisms live in environments that inevitably fluctuate between mild and harsh conditions. As harsh conditions may cause extinctions, the rate at which fluctuations occur can shape microbial communities and their diversity, but we…
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…
Ecological and evolutionary dynamics have been historically regarded as unfolding at broadly separated timescales. However, these two types of processes are nowadays well documented to much more tightly than traditionally assumed,…
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…
Bacteriophage-bacteria interactions are central to microbial ecology, influencing evolution, biogeochemical cycles, and pathogen behavior. Most theoretical models assume static environments and passive bacterial hosts, neglecting the joint…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…