Related papers: Senescence Can Explain Microbial Persistence
We present a two-species population model in a well-mixed environment where the dynamics involves, in addition to birth and death, changes due to environmental factors and inter-species interactions. The novel dynamical components are…
Drug gradients are believed to play an important role in the evolution of bacteria resistant to antibiotics and tumors resistant to anti-cancer drugs. We use a statistical physics model to study the evolution of a population of malignant…
Cells of the human body have nearly identical genome but exhibit very different phenotypes that allow them to carry out specific functions and react to changes in their surrounding environment. This division of labour is achieved by…
Antimicrobial resistance is an emerging global health crisis that is undermining advances in modern medicine and, if unmitigated, threatens to kill 10 million people per year worldwide by 2050. Research over the last decade has demonstrated…
The observation that phenotypic variability is ubiquitous in isogenic populations has led to a multitude of experimental and theoretical studies seeking to probe the causes and consequences of this variability. Whether it be in the context…
We consider a system of nonlinear partial differential equations that describes an age-structured population inhabiting several temporally varying patches. We prove existence and uniqueness of solution and analyze its large-time behavior in…
Understanding under what conditions populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, persist is an issue of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and environmental fluctuations…
Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature and come in a multitude of forms, ranging from communities dominated by a handful of species to communities containing a wide variety of metabolically distinct organisms. This huge range in…
A packed community of exponentially proliferating microbes will spread in size exponentially. However, due to nutrient depletion, mechanical constraints, or other limitations, exponential proliferation is not indefinite, and the spreading…
Phenotype of biological systems needs to be robust against mutation in order to sustain themselves between generations. On the other hand, phenotype of an individual also needs to be robust against fluctuations of both internal and external…
A macroscopic theory for describing cellular states during steady-growth is presented, which is based on the consistency between cellular growth and molecular replication, as well as the robustness of phenotypes against perturbations.…
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…
A multiplication on persistence diagrams is introduced by means of Schubert calculus. The key observation behind this multiplication comes from the fact that the representation space of persistence modules has the structure of the Schubert…
Biomolecular condensates are cellular phase-separated droplets that usually exhibit a viscoelastic mechanical response. A behavior rationalized by modeling the complex molecules that make up a condensate as stickers and spacers, which…
We study a simple model of DNA evolution in a growing population of cells. Each cell contains a nucleotide sequence which randomly mutates at cell division. Cells divide according to a branching process. Following typical parameter values…
The intestinal microbiota plays important roles in digestion and resistance against entero-pathogens. As with other ecosystems, its species composition is resilient against small disturbances but strong perturbations such as antibiotics can…
We point out that a simple and generic strategy to lower the risk for extinction consists in the developing a dormant stage in which the organism is unable to multiply but may die. The dormant organism is protected against the poisonous…
Mutation rate is a key determinant of the pace as well as outcome of evolution, and variability in this rate has been shown in different scenarios to play a key role in evolutionary adaptation and resistance evolution under stress caused by…
We explore the emergence of persistent infection in a patch of population, where the disease progression of the individuals is given by the SIRS model and an individual becomes infected on contact with another infected individual. We…
Bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics by a multitude of mechanisms. A central, yet unsolved question is how resistance evolution affects cell growth at different drug levels. Here we develop a fitness model that predicts growth rates of…