Related papers: Senescence Can Explain Microbial Persistence
We describe the evolution of the quantity of parasites in a population of cells which divide in continuous-time. The quantity of parasites in a cell follows a Feller diffusion, which is splitted randomly between the two daughter cells when…
Through in-depth thinking and reasoning about the conditions required for cells to maintain unchanged material distribution, it is concluded that life metabolic reactions require high information content. However, the self-replication of a…
Fractional killing in response to drugs is a hallmark of non-genetic cellular heterogeneity. Yet how individual lineages evade drug treatment, as observed in bacteria and cancer cells, is not quantitatively understood. We analyse a…
Some microbial organisms are known to randomly slip into and out of hibernation, irrespective of environmental conditions [1]. In a (genetically) uniform population a typically very small subpopulation becomes metabolically inactive whereas…
Persistence phenomena in colonization processes could explain the negative results of SETI search preserving the possibility of a galactic civilization. However, persistence phenomena also indicates that search of technological…
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.…
Many types of bacteria can survive under stress by switching stochastically between two different phenotypes: the "normals" who multiply fast, but are vulnerable to stress, and the "persisters" who hardly multiply, but are resilient to…
Antimicrobial protocols - using substances such as antibiotics or disinfectants - remain the preferred option for preventing the spread of pathogenic bacteria. However, bacteria can develop mechanisms to reduce their antimicrobial…
The cell cycle duration is a variable cellular phenotype that underlies long-term population growth and age structures. By analyzing the stationary solutions of a branching process with heritable cell division times, we demonstrate…
Whether evolution can be predicted is a key question in evolutionary biology. Here we set out to better understand the repeatability of evolution. We explored experimentally the effect of mutation supply and the strength of selective…
How cells maintain a stable size has fascinated scientists since the beginning of modern biology, but has remained largely mysterious. Recently, however, the ability to analyze single bacteria in real time has provided new, important…
Cells maintain a stable size as they grow and divide. Inspired by the available experimental data, most proposed models for size homeostasis assume size control mechanisms that act on a timescale of one generation. Such mechanisms lead to…
The storage effect is a well-known explanation for coexistence in temporally varying environments. Like many complex ecological theories, the storage effect is often used as an explanation for observed coexistence on the basis of heuristic…
It is generally recognized that a distinguishing feature of life is its peculiar capability to avoid equilibration. The origin of this capability and its evolution along the timeline of abiogenesis is not yet understood. We propose to study…
The evolution of multicellularity was a major transition in the history of life on earth. Conditions under which multicellularity is favored have been studied theoretically and experimentally. But since the construction of a multicellular…
Biofilm infections on medical implants are difficult to eradicate because insufficient nutrient availability promotes antibiotic-tolerant persister cells that survive treatment and reseed growth. Existing mathematical models usually omit…
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…
Cellular senescence is thought to play a major role in age-related diseases, which cause nearly 67% of all human deaths worldwide. Recent research in mice showed that exercising mice had higher levels of telomerase, an enzyme that helps…
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…
We consider a system of nonlinear partial differential equations that describes an age-structured population living in changing environment on $N$ patches. We prove existence and uniqueness of solution and analyze large time behavior of the…