Related papers: Optimal strategies for fighting persistent bugs

As antibiotic resistance grows more frequent for common bacterial infections, alternative treatment strategies such as phage therapy have become more widely studied in the medical field. While many studies have explored the efficacy of…

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…

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,…

When confronted with an undesired cell population, such as bacterial infections or tumors, we seek the most effective treatment, designed to eliminate the population as rapidly as possible. A common practice is to monitor the cells…

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…

In the absence of drugs and vaccines, policymakers use non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing to decrease rates of disease-causing contact, with the aim of reducing or delaying the epidemic peak. These measures carry…

Up to now, the effects of having heterogeneous networks of contacts have been studied mostly for diseases which are not persistent in time, i.e., for diseases where the infectious period can be considered very small compared to the lifetime…

While the mechanisms and quantitative details are complex, few analysts would doubt that antibiotic use increases the prevalence of drug-resistant bacterial pathogens among all bacteria causing disease in a population. The causal connection…

One of the most challenging problems in microbiology is to understand how a small fraction of microbes that resists killing by antibiotics can emerge in a population of genetically identical cells, the phenomenon known as persistence or…

The evolution and emergence of antibiotic resistance is a major public health concern. The understanding of the within-host microbial dynamics combining mutational processes, horizontal gene transfer and resource consumption, is one of the…

The evolution of antibiotic resistance among bacteria threatens our continued ability to treat infectious diseases. The need for sustainable strategies to cure bacterial infections has never been greater. So far, all attempts to restore…

Microbes thrive in diverse porous environments -- from soil and riverbeds to human lungs and cancer tissues -- spanning multiple scales and conditions. Short- to long-term fluctuations in local factors induce spatio-temporal…

Microbes are everywhere, including in and on our bodies, and have been shown to play key roles in a variety of prevalent human diseases. Consequently, there has been intense interest in the design of bacteriotherapies or "bugs as drugs,"…

Consider a species whose population density solves the steady diffusive logistic equation in a heterogeneous environment modeled with the help of a spatially non constant coefficient standing for a resources distribution in a given box. We…

Growth in bacterial populations generally depends on the environment (availability and quality of nutrients, presence of a toxic inhibitor, product inhibition..). Here, we build a model to describe the action of a bacteriostatic antibiotic,…

Metagenomics has revealed hundreds of bacterial species in almost all microbiota. In a few well-studied cases, bacterial communities have been observed to coordinate their metabolic fluxes. In principle, bacteria can divide tasks to reap…

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…

It has recently been reported that bacteria, such as E.coli and P. putida, perform distinct modes of motion when placed in porous media as compared to dilute regions or free space. This has led us to suggest an efficient strategy for active…

Antibiotic resistance is a topical problem for both humans and animals and has been the subject of special monitoring for two decades. Several recent studies, including ours, have shown that this phenomenon is accentuated by the transfer of…

Bacteria typically reside in heterogeneous environments with various chemogradients where motile cells can gain an advantage over non-motile cells. Since motility is energetically costly, cells must optimize their swimming speed and…