Related papers: Robust chemotaxis beyond sensing limits: signal, n…
Growing living cultures of Escherichia coli bacteria were investigated using real-time in situ rheology and rheo-imaging measurements. In the early stages of growth (lag phase), and when subjected to a constant stationary shear, the…
Biological molecular machines are enzymes that simultaneously catalyze two processes, one donating free energy and second accepting it. Recent studies show that most native protein enzymes have a rich stochastic dynamics that often…
The self-organization of microbial ecosystems involves a large variety of mechanisms, ranging from biochemical signaling to population dynamics. Among these, the role of motility regulation has been little studied, despite the importance of…
Cell migration often exhibits long-range temporal correlations and anomalous diffusion, even in the absence of external guidance cues such as chemical gradients or topographical constraints. These observations raise a fundamental question:…
We propose a new scheme to infer the metabolic fluxes of cell cultures in a chemostat. Our approach is based on the Maximum Entropy Principle and exploits the understanding of the chemostat dynamics and its connection with the actual…
Many phenomena in biology involve both reactions and chemotaxis. These processes can clearly influence each other, and chemotaxis can play an important role in sustaining and speeding up the reaction. In continuation of our earlier work, we…
Active particles with their characteristic feature of self-propulsion are regarded as the simplest models for motility in living systems. The accumulation of active particles in low activity regions has led to the general belief that…
We show that a rate of conditional Shannon entropy reduction, characterizing the learning of an internal process about an external process, is bounded by the thermodynamic entropy production. This approach allows for the definition of an…
Environmental fluctuations can shape replicator dynamics, with important consequences for both prebiotic and modern ecosystems. However, it remains unclear how simple replicators can acquire and use information about fluctuating…
The rheological response under simple shear of an active suspension of Escherichia coli is determined in a large range of shear rates and concentrations. The effective viscosity and the time scales characterizing the bacterial organization…
Motile bacteria are known to accumulate at surfaces, eventually leading to changes in bacterial motility and bio-film formation. We use a novel two-colour, three-dimensional Lagrangian tracking technique, to follow simultaneously the body…
Cells use biochemical networks to translate environmental information into intracellular responses. These responses can be highly dynamic, but how the information is encoded in these dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate…
The design of biologically-inspired wireless communication systems using bacteria as the basic element of the system is initially motivated by a phenomenon called \emph{Quorum Sensing}. Due to high randomness in the individual behavior of a…
Biological systems sense and extract information from fluctuating signals while operating under energetic constraints and limited resolution. We introduce a general chemical model in which a sensor, coupled to a signaling pathway activated…
Chemotaxis of the bacterium Escherichia coli is well understood in shallow chemical gradients, but its swimming behavior remains difficult to interpret in steep gradients. By focusing on single-cell trajectories from simulations, we…
Biological sensory systems react to changes in their surroundings. They are characterized by fast response and slow adaptation to varying environmental cues. Insofar as sensory adaptive systems map environmental changes to changes of their…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…
We investigate the performance of sparsely-connected networks of integrate-and-fire neurons for ultra-short term information processing. We exploit the fact that the population activity of networks with balanced excitation and inhibition…
The Keller-Segel system has been widely proposed as a model for bacterial waves driven by chemotactic processes. Current experiments on {\em E. coli} have shown precise structure of traveling pulses. We present here an alternative…
Synapses are information efficient in the sense that their natural conductance values convey as many bits per Joule as possible, but efficiency falls rapidly if the conductance is forced to deviate from its natural value (Harris et al,…