Related papers: Barrier-Free Microhabitats: Self-Organized Seclusi…

Metapopulation models have been instrumental in demonstrating the ecological impact of landscape structure on the survival of a focal species in complex environments. However, extensions to multiple species with arbitrary dispersal networks…

Flagellar-driven locomotion plays a critical role in bacterial attachment and colonization of surfaces, contributing to the risks of contamination and infection. Tremendous attempts to uncover the underlying principles governing bacterial…

Bacteria organize in a variety of collective states, from swarming, which has been attributed to rapid surface exploration, to biofilms, which are highly dense immobile communities attributed to stress resistance. It has been suggested that…

Fluid flow has a major effect on the aggregation and fragmentation of bacterial colonies. Yet, a generic framework to understand and predict how hydrodynamics affects colony size remains elusive. This study investigates how fluid flow…

Environmental heterogeneity can drive genetic heterogeneity in expanding populations; mutant strains may emerge that trade overall growth rate for an improved ability to survive in patches that are hostile to the wild type. This…

The gut microbiota features important genetic diversity, and the specific spatial features of the gut may shape evolution within this environment. We investigate the fixation probability of neutral bacterial mutants within a minimal model…

It has recently been reported that bacteria, such as E.coli and P. putida, perform distinct modes of motion when placed in porous media as compared to dilute regions or free space. This has led us to suggest an efficient strategy for active…

How systems are endowed with migration capacity is a fascinating question with implications ranging from the design of novel active systems to the control of microbial populations. Bacteria, which can be found in a variety of environments,…

Diseases emerge, persist and vanish in an ongoing battle for available hosts. Hosts, on the other hand, defend themselves by developing immunity that limits the ability of pathogens to reinfect them. We here explore a multi-disease system…

Microbial colonies cultured on agar Petri dishes have become a model system to study biological evolution in populations expanding in space. Processes such as clonal segregation and gene surfing have been shown to be affected by…

Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…

We study a system of self-propelled, proliferating finite-size disks with game-theoretical interactions, where growth rates depend on local population composition. We analyze how these interactions influence spatial distribution,…

Self-organisation is the spontaneous emergence of spatio-temporal structures and patterns from the interaction of smaller individual units. Examples are found across many scales in very different systems and scientific disciplines, from…

Microbial dormancy is an evolutionary trait that has emerged independently at various positions across the tree of life. It describes the ability of a microorganism to switch to a metabolically inactive state that can withstand unfavorable…

The native state structures of globular proteins are stable and well-packed indicating that self-interactions are favored over protein-solvent interactions under folding conditions. We use this as a guiding principle to derive the geometry…

Filamentous cyanobacteria can show fascinating examples of nonequilibrium self-organization, which however are not well-understood from a physical perspective. We investigate the motility and collective organization of colonies of these…

The twisting and writhing of a cell body and associated mechanical stresses is an underappreciated constraint on microbial self-propulsion. Multi-flagellated bacteria can even buckle and writhe under their own activity as they swim through…

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…

The onset of life is often framed around membrane bound compartments and encoded metabolism, leaving unresolved how spatial organization arose before stable boundaries. In this context, environmental gradients are usually treated as…

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…