Related papers: Conditions for Bacterial Selection and Extinction …

We model an enclosed system of bacteria, whose motility-induced phase separation is coupled to slow population dynamics. Without noise, the system shows both static phase separation and a limit cycle, in which a rising global population…

Bacteria possess diverse mechanisms to regulate their motility in response to environmental and physiological signals, enabling them to navigate complex habitats and adapt their behavior. Among these mechanisms, interspecies recognition…

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 rise of antimicrobial drug resistance is an imminent threat to global health that has warranted, and duly received, considerable attention within the medical, microbiological and modelling communities. Outbreaks of drug-resistant…

This work introduces a new statistical physics lattice model of bacteria interacting with anti-microbial drugs that can reproduce qualitative features of resistance emergence and whose model parameters and outputs can be measured with…

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…

Bacteria and their viruses ("bacteriophages") coexist in natural environments forming complex infection networks. Recent empirical findings suggest that phage-bacteria infection networks often possess a nested structure such that there is a…

Pathogenic bacteria present a large disease burden on human health. Control of these pathogens is hampered by rampant lateral gene transfer, whereby pathogenic strains may acquire genes conferring resistance to common antibiotics. Here we…

Non-genetic forms of antimicrobial drug resistance can result from cell-to-cell variability that is not encoded in the genetic material. Data from recent studies also suggest that non-genetic mechanisms can facilitate the development of…

In order to grow in any given environment, bacteria need to collect information about the medium composition and implement suitable growth strategies by adjusting their regulatory and metabolic degrees of freedom. In the standard sense,…

Biological systems are promising substrates for computation because they naturally process environmental information through complex internal dynamics. In this study, we investigate whether bacterial metabolic models can act as physical…

Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…

A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…

As antibiotic resistance continues to pose a significant threat to public health, alternative treatments are urgently needed. Phage therapy, which utilizes bacteriophages to specifically target bacterial pathogens, has emerged as a…

Phase variation, or stochastic switching between alternative states of gene expression, is common among microbes, and may be important in coping with changing environments. We use a theoretical model to assess whether such switching is a…

Communication and coordination play a major role in the ability of bacterial cells to adapt to ever changing environments and conditions. Recent work has shown that such coordination underlies several aspects of bacterial responses…

We consider the dynamics of spatially-distributed, diffusing populations of organisms with antagonistic interactions. These interactions are found on many length scales, ranging from kilometer-scale animal range dynamics with selection…

We study the effect of discreteness on various models for patterning in bacterial colonies. In a bacterial colony with branching pattern, there are discrete entities - bacteria - which are only two orders of magnitude smaller than the…

Contamination can severely distort an estimator unless the estimation procedure is suitably robust. This is a well-known issue and has been addressed in Robust Statistics, however, the relation of contamination and distorted variable…

Evolutionary transitions among ecological interactions are widely known, although their detailed dynamics remain absent for most population models. Adaptive dynamics has been used to illustrate how the parameters of population models might…