Related papers: Global Constraint Principle for Microbial Growth L…
Monod's model describes the growth of microorganisms using a hyperbolic function of extracellular resource concentration. Under fluctuating or limited resource concentrations this model performs poorly against experimental data, motivating…
The dynamics of microbial communities is incredibly complex, determined by competition for metabolic substrates and cross-feeding of byproducts. Species in the community grow by harvesting energy from chemical reactions that transform…
Quantitative characterization of bacterial growth has gathered substantial attention since Monod's pioneering study. Theoretical and experimental work has uncovered several laws for describing the log growth phase, in which the number of…
We present significantly advanced studies of the previously introduced physical growth mechanism and unite it with biochemical growth factors. Obtained results allowed formulating the general growth law which governs growth and evolutional…
We propose a method for finding metabolic parameters of cells, organs and whole organisms, which is based on the earlier discovered general growth law. Based on the obtained results and analysis of available biological models, we propose a…
Cancer cell populations often exhibit remarkably similar growth laws despite their heterogeneity. Explanations of universal cell population growth remain partly unresolved to this day. Here, we present a growth-law unification by…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
Predicting cellular metabolic states is a central problem in biophysics. Conventional approaches, however, sensitively depend on the microscopic details of individual metabolic systems. In this Letter, we derived a universal linear…
The "Law of the Minimum" states that growth is controlled by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). This concept was originally applied to plant or crop growth (Justus von Liebig, 1840) and quantitatively supported by many experiments.…
A classical problem describing the collective motion of cells, is the movement driven by consumption/depletion of a nutrient. Here we analyze one of the simplest such model written as a coupled Partial Differential Equation/Ordinary…
Growth in bacterial populations generally depends on the environment (availability and quality of nutrients, presence of a toxic inhibitor, product inhibition..). Here, we build a model to describe the action of a bacteriostatic antibiotic,…
Most organisms grow according to simple laws, which in principle can be derived from energy conservation and scaling arguments, critically dependent on the relation between the metabolic rate B of energy flow and the organism mass m.…
Regardless of a system's complexity or scale, its growth can be considered to be a spontaneous thermodynamic response to a local convergence of down-gradient material flows. Here it is shown how growth can be constrained to a few distinct…
This paper investigates the role of size in biological organisms. More specifically, how the energy demand, expressed by the metabolic rate, changes according to the mass of an organism. Empirical evidence suggests a power-law relation…
Understanding biological phenomena requires a systemic approach that incorporates different mechanisms acting on different spatial and temporal scales, since in organisms the workings of all components, such as organelles, cells, and organs…
Shape is one of the important characteristics for the structures observed in living organisms. Whereas biologists have proposed models where the shape is controlled on a molecular level [1], physicists, following Turing [2] and d'Arcy…
We study an optimal control problem arising from a resource allocation problem in cellular metabolism. A minimalistic model that describes the production of enzymatic vs. non-enzymatic biomass components from a single nutrient source is…
A general multi-type population model is considered, where individuals live and reproduce according to their age and type, but also under the influence of the size and composition of the entire population. We describe the dynamics of the…
Despite major environmental and genetic differences, microbial metabolic networks are known to generate consistent physiological outcomes across vastly different organisms. This remarkable robustness suggests that, at least in bacteria,…
The composition of cellular metabolism is different across species. Empirical data reveal that bacterial species contain similar numbers of metabolic reactions but that the cross-species popularity of reactions is so heterogenous that some…