Related papers: Barrier-Free Microhabitats: Self-Organized Seclusi…
Microorganisms hosted in abiotic structures have led to engineered living materials that can grow, sense and adapt in ways that mimic biological systems. Although porous structures should favor colonization by microorganisms, they have not…
The motility of eukaryotic cells is strongly influenced by their environment, with confined cells often developing qualitatively different motility patterns from those migrating on simple two-dimensional substrates. Recent experiments,…
The interaction networks of biological systems are known to take on several non-random structural properties, some of which are believed to positively influence system robustness. Researchers are only starting to understand how these…
Bacterial biofilms are usually assumed to originate from individual cells deposited on a surface. However, many biofilm-forming bacteria tend to aggregate in the planktonic phase so that it is possible that many natural and infectious…
Local interactions of uncoordinated individuals produce the collective behaviors of many biological systems, inspiring much of the current research in programmable matter. A striking example is the spontaneous assembly of fire ants into…
Toxic cyanobacterial blooms are a growing environmental concern that affects freshwater ecosystems, drinking water supplies, and public health. The cyanobacterium Microcystis is among the most important bloom forming species. It often grows…
Microorganisms self-organize in very large communities exhibiting complex fluctuations. Despite recent advances, still the mechanism by which these systems are able to exhibit large variability at the one hand and dynamical robustness on…
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…
While it is well established that self-propelled particles with alignment interactions can exhibit orientational order, the impact of self-replication and annihilation, which are key characteristics in cellular systems, on spatiotemporal…
Microbiomes, which are collections of interacting microbes in an environment, often substantially impact the environmental patches or living hosts that they occupy. In microbiome models, it is important to consider both the local dynamics…
The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…
Amorphous grain boundary complexions act as toughening features within a microstructure because they can absorb dislocations more efficiently than traditional grain boundaries. This toughening effect should be a strong function of the local…
Natural bacterial habitats are often complex fluids with viscoelastic and anisotropic responses to stress; for example, they can take the form of liquid crystals (LCs), with elongated microscopic constituents that collectively align while…
Understanding the stability of complex communities is a central focus in ecology, many important theoretical advancements have been made to identify drivers of ecological stability. However, previous results often rely on the…
Geographic borders are not only essential for the effective functioning of government, the distribution of administrative responsibilities and the allocation of public resources, they also influence the interregional flow of information,…
Cells maintain a stable size as they grow and divide. Inspired by the available experimental data, most proposed models for size homeostasis assume size control mechanisms that act on a timescale of one generation. Such mechanisms lead to…
We investigate the emergence of global alignment in colonies of dividing rod-shaped cells under confinement. Using molecular dynamics simulations and continuous modeling, we demonstrate that geometrical anisotropies in the confining…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
Experimental studies of cell motility in culture have shown that under adequate conditions these living organisms possess the ability to organize themselves into complex structures. Such structures may exhibit a synergy that greatly…
Soil microbial communities are known to be robust against perturbations such as nutrition inputs, which appears as an obstacle for the soil improvement. On the other hand, its adaptable aspect has been also reported. Here we propose simple…