Related papers: Distinguishable spreading dynamics in microbial co…
Nutrient gradients and limitations play a pivotal role in the life of all microbes, both in their natural habitat as well as in artificial, microfluidic systems. Spatial concentration gradients of nutrients in densely packed cell…
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…
Reaction-diffusion equations describe various spatially extended processes that unfold as traveling fronts moving at constant velocity. We introduce and solve analytically a model that, besides such fronts, supports solutions advancing as…
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…
Biofilm infections on medical implants are difficult to eradicate because insufficient nutrient availability promotes antibiotic-tolerant persister cells that survive treatment and reseed growth. Existing mathematical models usually omit…
Cell colonies of bacteria, tumour cells and fungi, under nutrient limited growth conditions, exhibit complex branched growth patterns. In order to investigate this phenomenon we present a simple hybrid cellular automaton model of cell…
We introduce a nonlinear and nonlocal model that describes the range expansion of a population resulting from growth and competition for space. This type of phenomenon underlies the expansion of colonies of immotile cells which motivated…
Nutrient limitation is one of the most common triggers of antibiotic tolerance and persistence. Here, we present two microfluidic setups to study how spatial and temporal variation in nutrient availability lead to increased survival of…
We study the dynamics of proliferating cell collectives whose microscopic constituents' growth is inhibited by macroscopic growth-induced stress. Discrete particle simulations of a growing collective show the emergence of concentric-ring…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…
High-throughput experimental techniques and bioinformatics tools make it possible to obtain reconstructions of the metabolism of microbial species. Combined with mathematical frameworks such as flux balance analysis, which assumes that…
To explore the coupling between a growing population of microorganisms such as E. coli and a nonuniform nutrient distribution, we formulate a minimalistic model. It consists of active Brownian particles that divide and grow at a…
We investigate the dynamics of a colony of crawling, proliferating cells with a minimal, mechanical cell model. The cells consist of two disks, modelling the cell body and a pseudopod, connected by a finite extensible spring. The cells…
We investigate the evolution of a population of non-interacting particles which undergo diffusion and multiplication. Diffusion is assumed to be homogeneous, while multiplication proceeds with different rates reflecting the distribution of…
I consider how cell shape and environmental geometry affect the rate of nutrient capture and the consequent maximum growth rate of a cell, focusing on rod-like species like \textit{E.\ coli}. Simple modeling immediately implies that it is…
The spreading of bacterial populations is central to processes in agriculture, the environment, and medicine. However, existing models of spreading typically focus on cells in unconfined settings--despite the fact that many bacteria inhabit…
Microbial communities routinely have several alternative stable states observed for the same environmental parameters. Sudden and irreversible transitions between these states make external manipulation of these systems more complicated. To…
We classify and predict the asymptotic dynamics of a class of swarming models. The model consists of a conservation equation in one dimension describing the movement of a population density field. The velocity is found by convolving the…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
In exponentially proliferating populations of microbes, the population typically doubles at a rate less than the average doubling time of a single-cell due to variability at the single-cell level. It is known that the distribution of…