Related papers: Spatial structure facilitates evolutionary rescue …
Understanding if and how mutants reach fixation in populations is an important question in evolutionary biology. We study the impact of population growth has on the success of mutants. To systematically understand the effects of growth we…
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…
Viruses like influenza have long coevolved with host immune systems, gradually shaping the evolutionary trajectory of these pathogens. Host immune systems develop immunity against circulating strains, which in turn avoid extinction by…
The question of whether biological populations survive or are eventually driven to extinction has long been examined using mathematical models. In this work we study population survival or extinction using a stochastic, discrete…
The sustainable management of common resources often leads to a social dilemma known as the tragedy of the commons: individuals benefit from rapid extraction of resources, while communities as a whole benefit from more sustainable…
How producers of public goods persist in microbial communities is a major question in evolutionary biology. Cooperation is evolutionarily unstable, since cheating strains can reproduce quicker and take over. Spatial structure has been shown…
We consider a mutation-selection model of a population structured by the spatial variables and a trait variable which is the diffusion rate. Competition for resource is local in spatial variables, but nonlocal in the trait variable. We…
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…
Proteus mirabilis are bacteria that make strikingly regular spatial-temporal patterns on agar surfaces. In this paper we investigate a mathematical model that has been shown to display these structures when solved numerically. The model…
Soil is a complex, dynamic material, with physical properties that depend on its biological content. We propose a cellular automaton model for self-organizing soil structure, where soil aggregates and serves as food for microbial species.…
We study the spatial patterns formed by a system of interacting particles where the mobility of any individual is determined by the population crowding at two different spatial scales. In this way we model the behavior of some biological…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
Immigration can rescue local populations from extinction, helping to stabilise a metapopulation. Local population dynamics is important for determining the strength of this rescue effect, but the mechanistic link between local demographic…
Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…
It is widely accepted that population genetics theory is the cornerstone of evolutionary analyses. Empirical tests of the theory, however, are challenging because of the complex relationships between space, dispersal, and evolution.…
Emerging marine infectious diseases pose a substantial threat to marine ecosystems and the conservation of their biodiversity. Compartmental models of epidemic transmission in marine sessile organisms, available only recently, are based on…
We consider the dynamics of spatially-distributed, diffusing populations of organisms with antagonistic interactions. These interactions are found on many length scales, ranging from kilometer-scale animal range dynamics with selection…
We consider populations structured by a phenotypic trait and a space variable, in a non-homogeneous environment. In the case of sex- ual populations, we are able to derive models close to existing mod- els in theoretical biology, from a…
Phenotypic heterogeneity is a strategy commonly used by bacteria to rapidly adapt to changing environmental conditions. Here, we study the interplay between phenotypic heterogeneity and genetic diversity in spatially extended populations.…
We consider the class of SIS epidemic models in which a large population of individuals chooses whether to adopt protection or to remain unprotected as the epidemic evolves. For a susceptible individual, adopting protection reduces the…