Related papers: Heterogeneity drives plasmid maintenance in large …
We present a two-species population model in a well-mixed environment where the dynamics involves, in addition to birth and death, changes due to environmental factors and inter-species interactions. The novel dynamical components are…
Why, contrary to theoretical predictions, do marine microbe communities harbor tremendous phenotypic heterogeneity? How can so many marine microbe species competing in the same niche coexist? We discovered a unifying explanation for both…
Plasmids are major players in Horizontal Gene Transfer mechanisms, hence they are highly variable in their gene content and length. We propose a model for the fitness of a plasmid as a function of its length, which predicts diminishing…
Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
Individuals within any species exhibit differences in size, developmental state, or spatial location. These differences coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates can have subtle effects on population persistence and…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
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…
Microorganisms live in environments that inevitably fluctuate between mild and harsh conditions. As harsh conditions may cause extinctions, the rate at which fluctuations occur can shape microbial communities and their diversity, but we…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
The introduction of non-native organisms into complex microbiome communities holds enormous potential to benefit society. However, microbiome engineering faces several challenges including successful establishment of the organism into the…
The foundational concepts behind the persistence of ecological communities have been based on two ecological properties: dynamical stability and feasibility. The former is typically regarded as the capacity of a community to return to an…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
Mobile genetic elements like conjugative plasmids play a crucial role in shaping the genetic content and population dynamics of bacterial species. Bacterial populations often contain not one, but multiple co-circulating MGEs, which modify…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
We consider a model for a population in a heterogeneous environment, with logistic type local population dynamics, under the assumption that individuals can switch between two different nonzero rates of diffusion. Such switching behavior…
The evolution of antimicrobial resistance generally occurs in an environment where antimicrobial concentration is variable, which has dramatic consequences on the microorganisms' fitness landscape, and thus on the evolution of resistance.…
We study distributed agreement in microbial distributed systems under stochastic population dynamics and competitive interactions. Motivated by recent applications in synthetic biology, we examine how the presence and absence of direct…
The segregation of plasmids in a bacterial population is investigated. Hereby, a dynamical model is formulated in terms of a size-structured population using a hyperbolic partial differential equation incorporating non-local terms (the…