Related papers: Microbes in porous environments: From active inter…
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).…
The human microbiome is a complex ecological system, and describing its structure and function under different environmental conditions is important from both basic scientific and medical perspectives. Viewed through a biostatistical lens,…
Suspensions of swimming micro-organisms are known to undergo intricate collective dynamics as a result of hydrodynamic and collision interactions. Micro-swimmers, such as bacteria and micro-algae, naturally live and have evolved in complex…
Microbial communities display extreme diversity. A variety of strains or species coexist even when limited by a single resource. It has been argued that metabolite secretion creates new niches and facilitates such diversity. Nonetheless, it…
Models in evolutionary game theory traditionally assume symmetric interactions in homogeneous environments. Here, we consider populations evolving in a heterogeneous environment, which consists of patches of different qualities that are…
We study the growth of a population of bacteria in a dynamical hostile environment corresponding to the immune system of the colonised organism. The immune cells evolve as subcritical open clusters of oriented percolation and are…
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…
Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental in living and engineering systems. This has stimulated the new field of active matter in recent years, which focuses on the physical aspects of propulsion mechanisms, and on motility-induced…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
The exchange of diffusive metabolites is known to control the spatial patterns formed by microbial populations, as revealed by recent studies in the laboratory. However, the matrices used, such as agarose pads, lack the structured geometry…
The metabolic activity of microbes has played an essential role in the evolution and persistence of life on Earth. Microbial metabolism plays a primary role in the flow of carbon, nitrogen and other elements through the biosphere on a…
Interaction between active materials and the boundaries of geometrical confinement is key to many emergent phenomena in active systems. For living active matter consisting of animal cells or motile bacteria, the confinement boundary is…
This review focuses on microbiomes associated with residues within the context of other microbial habitats in cereal-producing agroecosystems such as phyllosphere or rhizosphere. We connect residue microbiome with the survival of…
Proliferating cell collectives often develop an active growth layer near their boundary that regulates expansion and morphology, as observed in systems ranging from bacterial biofilms to epithelial tissues and tumor spheroids. While such…
The field of active matter explores the behaviors of self propelled agents out of equilibrium, with active suspensions, such as swimming bacteria in solutions, serving as impactful models. These systems exhibit spatio-temporal patterns akin…
Microbiology is the science of microbes, particularly bacteria. Many bacteria are motile: they are capable of self-propulsion. Among these, a significant class execute so-called run-and-tumble motion: they follow a fairly straight path for…
Active systems comprised of self-propelled units show fascinating transitions from Brownian-like dynamics to collective coherent motion. Swirling of swimming bacteria is a spectacular example. This study demonstrates that a nematic liquid…
The spatial organization of bacteria in dense biofilms is key to their collective behaviour, and understanding it will be important for medical and technological applications. Here we study the morphology of a compact biofilm that undergoes…
Water near hydrophobic surfaces is like that at a liquid-vapor interface, where fluctuations in water density are substantially enhanced compared to that in bulk water. Here we use molecular simulations with specialized sampling techniques…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…