Related papers: Heterogeneity drives plasmid maintenance in large …
Unlike coffee and cream that homogenize when stirred, growing micro-organisms (e.g., bacteria, baker's yeast) can actively kill each other and avoid mixing. How do such antagonistic interactions impact the growth and survival of competing…
In subdivided populations, migration acts together with selection and genetic drift and determines their evolution. Building up on a recently proposed method, which hinges on the emergence of a time scale separation between local and global…
Predicting species persistence within ecological communities is a fundamental challenge for both empirical and theoretical ecology. Existing methods span from mechanistic models, whose parameters are difficult to estimate from data, to…
The compartmentalization of distinct templates in protocells and the exchange of templates between them (migration) are key elements of a modern scenario for prebiotic evolution. Here we use the diffusion approximation of population…
Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…
Interactions in natural communities can be highly heterogeneous, with any given species interacting appreciably with only some of the others, a situation commonly represented by sparse interaction networks. We study the consequences of…
By creating networks of biochemical pathways, communities of micro-organisms are able to modulate the properties of their environment and even the metabolic processes within their hosts. Next-generation high-throughput sequencing has led to…
Divergence between populations for a given trait can be driven by natural or sexual selection, interacting with migration behaviour. Mating preference for different phenotypes can lead to the emergence and persistence of differentiated…
The evolution of antimicrobial resistance can be strongly affected by variations of antimicrobial concentration. Here, we study the impact of periodic alternations of absence and presence of antimicrobial on resistance evolution in a…
Cooperative interactions pervade in a broad range of many-body populations, such as ecological communities, social organizations, and economic webs. We investigate the dynamics of a population of two equivalent species A and B that are…
Individual heterogeneity is a key characteristic of many real-world systems, from organisms to humans. However its role in determining the system's collective dynamics is typically not well understood. Here we study how individual…
Understanding the mechanisms of species coexistence has always been a fundamental topic in ecology. Classical theory predicts that interspecific competition may select for traits that stabilize niche differences, although recent work shows…
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…
High-throughput sequencing techniques such as metagenomic and metatranscriptomic technologies allow cataloging of functional characteristics of microbial community members as well as their taxonomic identity. Such studies have found that a…
The observation that phenotypic variability is ubiquitous in isogenic populations has led to a multitude of experimental and theoretical studies seeking to probe the causes and consequences of this variability. Whether it be in the context…
Modern biological tools have made it possible to unequivocally demonstrate the deep relationship among species in terms of genes and basic molecular mechanisms. In addition, results from genetic, physical and physiological approaches…
This theory seeks to define species and to explore evolutionary forces and genetic elements in speciation and species maintenance. The theory explains how speciation and species maintenance are caused by natural selection acting on…
The competition for resources is a defining feature of microbial communities. In many contexts, from soils to host-associated communities, highly diverse microbes are organized into metabolic groups or guilds with similar resource…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
Ideas, behaviors, and opinions spread through social networks. If the probability of spreading to a new individual is a non-linear function of the fraction of the individuals' affected neighbors, such a spreading process becomes a "complex…