Related papers: Optimal strategies for fighting persistent bugs

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…

How should dispersal strategies be chosen to increase the likelihood of survival of a species? We obtain the answer for the spatially extended versions of three well-known models of two competing species with unequal diffusivities. Though…

We consider a population of identical individuals preying on an exhaustible resource. The individuals in the population choose a strategy that defines how they use their available time over the course of their life for feeding, for…

Antimicrobial resistance is a threat to public health with millions of deaths linked to drug resistant infections every year. To mitigate resistance, common strategies that are used are combination therapies and therapy switching. However,…

Antimicrobial resistance is a silent pandemic that is being exacerbated by the uncontrolled use of antibiotics. Since the discovery of penicillin, we have been largely dependent on microbe-derived small molecules to treat bacterial…

The evolution of antimicrobial resistance generally occurs in an environment where antimicrobial concentration is variable, which has dramatic consequences on the microorganisms' fitness landscape, and thus on the evolution of resistance.…

Experimental studies of microbial communities routinely reveal that they have multiple stable states. While each of these states is generally resilient, certain perturbations such as antibiotics, probiotics and diet shifts, result in…

Bacteriophages are viruses infecting bacteria and archaea. Many phage species cause infections which lead to the certain death of the infected prokaryotic host cell and the release of a large batch of phage progeny, yet they have been able…

Background: Microbiota have evolved to acclimate themselves to many environments. Humanity is become ever increasingly medicated and many of those medications are antibiotics. Sadly, Microbiota are adapting to medication and with each…

Phage therapy is an alternative treatment method for bacterial infections. It has shown particular promise in reducing bacterial load while preventing antibiotic resistance. Here, we develop a mathematical model of a bacterial infection…

Heterogeneous systems of active matter exhibit a range of complex emergent dynamical patterns. In particular, it is difficult to predict the properties of the mixed system based on its constituents. These considerations are particularly…

We consider active Brownian particles that intermittently switch between active and inactive states. Such behavior is ubiquitous at all scales, from bacteria to animals and in artificial active systems. We derive exact expressions for key…

The rise and spread of antibiotic resistance causes worsening medical cost and mortality especially for life-threatening bacteria infections, thereby posing a major threat to global health. Prescribing behavior of physicians is one of the…

A deterministic population dynamics model involving birth and death for a two-species system, comprising a wild-type and more resistant species competing via logistic growth, is subjected to two distinct stress environments designed to…

A bacterial colony may develop a small number of cells genetically identical to, but phenotypically different from other normally growing bacteria. These so-called persister cells keep themselves in a dormant state and thus are insensitive…

Researchers puzzle over questions as to how rare species survive extinction, and why a significant proportion of microbial taxa are dormant. Computational simulation modeling by a genetic algorithm provides some answers. First, a…

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…

Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between…

Upon infection of their bacterial hosts temperate phages must chose between lysogenic and lytic developmental strategies. Here we apply the game-theoretic bet-hedging strategy introduced by Kelly to derive the optimal lysogenic fraction of…

Spatially explicit models have been widely used in today's mathematical ecology and epidemiology to study persistence and extinction of populations as well as their spatial patterns. Here we extend the earlier work--static dispersal between…