Related papers: Substrate geometry affects population dynamics in …
Bacteria generally live in complicated structures called biofilms, consisting of communicating bacterial colonies and extracellular polymeric substance (EPS). Since biofilms are related to detrimental effects such as infection or antibiotic…
The evolution of microbial and viral organisms often generates clonal interference, a mode of competition between genetic clades within a population. In this paper, we show that interference strongly constrains the genetic and phenotypic…
Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…
Biological interactions with material surfaces span a wide range of length scales, yet conventional surface measurements often fail to account for scale, limiting the insights they provide for surface engineering. Here, we investigate how…
Evolutionary experiments with microbes are a powerful tool to study mutations and natural selection. These experiments, however, are often limited to the well-mixed environments of a test tube or a chemostat. Since spatial organization can…
Cell walls define a cell shape in bacteria. They are rigid to resist large internal pressures, but remarkably plastic to adapt to a wide range of external forces and geometric constraints. Currently, it is unknown how bacteria maintain…
Natural microbial populations often have complex spatial structures. This can impact their evolution, in particular the ability of mutants to take over. While mutant fixation probabilities are known to be unaffected by sufficiently…
Recent experimental and theoretical investigations of crystal growth from solution in the vicinity of an impermeable wall have shown that: (i) growth can be maintained within the contact region when a liquid film is present between the…
Colonies of rod-shaped bacteria constitute a system of colloidal active matter with nematic properties. As a single initial bacterium multiplies through repeated divisions, the resulting colony quickly loses long-range orientational order,…
Immotile microbes inhabit nearly every environment on Earth, from soils and sediments to food matrices -- yet how they disperse through these physically confining environments is poorly understood. Here, we show that immotile microbial…
When treated with antibiotics below the minimum inhibitory concentration, bacterial cell division turns off, but cell growth does not. Thus, rod-like bacteria, including E. coli, can elongate many times their length without increasing their…
Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…
Using three-dimensional numerical simulations, we demonstrate the growth saturation of an unstable thin liquid film on micropatterned hydrophilic-hydrophobic substrates. We consider different transverse-striped micropatterns, characterized…
Many mature bacterial colonies and biofilms are complex three-dimensional (3D) structures. One key step in their developmental program is a transition from a two-dimensional (2D) monolayer into a 3D architecture. Despite the importance of…
The rate of recombination affects the mode of molecular evolution. In high-recombining sequence, the targets of selection are individual genetic loci; under low recombination, selection collectively acts on large, genetically linked genomic…
Biofilms are complex structures which are inhabited by numerous amount of different species of microorganisms. Due to their ubiquity, they influence human life on an everyday basis. It is therefore important to understand the interactions…
A simulation approach to the stochastic growth of bacterial towers is presented, in which a non-uniform and finite nutrient supply essentially determines the emerging structure through elementary chemotaxis. The method is based on cellular…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
Engineering spatially organized biofilms for creating adaptive and sustainable biomaterials is a forthcoming mission of synthetic biology. Existing technologies of patterning biofilm materials suffer limitations associated with the high…
How particles are deposited at the edge of evaporating droplets, i.e. the {\em coffee ring} effect, plays a crucial role in phenomena as diverse as thin-film deposition, self-assembly, and biofilm formation. Recently, microorganisms have…