Related papers: Conditions for Bacterial Selection and Extinction …
New automated and high-throughput methods allow the manipulation and selection of numerous bacterial populations. In this manuscript we are interested in the neutral diversity patterns that emerge from such a setup in which many bacterial…
The design of protocols to suppress the propagation of viral infections is an enduring enterprise, especially hindered by limited knowledge of the mechanisms through which extinction of infection propagation comes about. We here report on a…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
When microbes compete for limited resources, they often engage in chemical warfare using bacterial toxins. This competition can be understood in terms of evolutionary game theory (EGT). We study the predictions of EGT for the bacterial…
Antimicrobial resistance is an emerging global health crisis that is undermining advances in modern medicine and, if unmitigated, threatens to kill 10 million people per year worldwide by 2050. Research over the last decade has demonstrated…
We demonstrate diversification rather than optimisation for highly interacting organisms in a well mixed biological system by means of a simple model and reference to experiment, and find the cause to be the complex network of interactions…
Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…
In natural environments, solid surfaces present both opportunities and challenges for bacteria. On one hand, they serve as platforms for biofilm formation, crucial for bacterial colonization and resilience in harsh conditions. On the other…
Transient compartments have been recently shown to be able to maintain functional replicators in the context of prebiotic studies. Motivated by this experiment, we show that a broad class of selection dynamics is able to achieve this goal.…
It has been known for many years that small fractions of persister cells resist killing in many bacterial colony-antimicrobial confrontations. These persisters are not believed to be mutants. Rather it has been hypothesized that they are…
Stochastic phenotype switching has been suggested to play a beneficial role in microbial populations by leading to the division of labour among cells, or ensuring that at least some of the population survives an unexpected change in…
Run-and-tumble is a common but vital strategy that bacteria employ to explore environment suffused with boundaries, as well as to escape from entrapment. In this study we reveal how this strategy and the resulting dynamical behavior can be…
The skin microbiome plays an important role in the maintenance of a healthy skin. It is an ecosystem, composed of several species, competing for resources and interacting with the skin cells. Imbalance in the cutaneous microbiome, also…
Bacterial communities such as biofilms are widely recognised as being important for survival and persistence of bacteria in harsh environments. Mechanistic models of biofilm growth indicate that the way in which the surface is seeded can…
Since penicillin was discovered about 90 years ago, we have become used to using drugs to eradicate unwanted pathogenic cells. However, using drugs to kill bacteria, viruses or cancer cells has the serious side effect of selecting for…
Antibiotics resistance has caused much complication in the treatment of diseases, where the pathogen is no longer susceptible to specific antibiotics and the use of such antibiotics are no longer effective for treatment. A recent study that…
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a risk for patients and a burden for the healthcare system. However, AMR assays typically take several days. This study develops predictive models for AMR based on easily available clinical and…
Understanding flow and transport of bacteria in porous media is crucial to technologies such as bioremediation, biomineralization or enhanced oil recovery. While physicochemical bacteria filtration is well-documented, recent studies showed…
Antibiotics are the wonder discoveries to combat microbes. For decades, multiple varieties of antibiotics have been used for therapeutic purposes in hospital settings and communities throughout the world. Unfortunately, bacteria have become…
High-throughput molecular screening is required to investigate the origin and diffusion of antimicrobial resistance in pathogen outbreaks. The most frequent cause of human infection is Escherichia coli, which is dominated by sequence type…