Related papers: Senescence Can Explain Microbial Persistence
How adaptive evolution to one environmental stress improves or suppresses adaptation to another is an important problem in evolutionary biology. For instance, in microbiology, the evolution of bacteria to be resistant to different…
Establishing a quantitative connection between the population growth rate and the generation times of single cells is a prerequisite for understanding evolutionary dynamics of microbes. However, existing theories fail to account for the…
For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an…
Cells can often choose among several stably heritable phenotypes. Examples are the expression of genes in eukaryotic cells where long chromosomal regions can adopt persistent and heritable silenced or active states, that may be associated…
A dynamic model for cell differentiation is studied, where cells with internal chemical reaction dynamics interact with each other and replicate. It leads to spontaneous differentiation of cells and determination, as is discussed in the…
The design of protocols to suppress the propagation of viral infections is an enduring enterprise, especially hindered by limited knowledge of the mechanisms through which extinction of infection propagation comes about. We here report on a…
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…
Proliferation and motility are ubiquitous drivers of activity in biological systems. Here, we study a dense binary mixture of motile and proliferating particles with exclusively repulsive interactions, where homeostasis in the proliferating…
Despite the wealth of empirical and theoretical studies, the origin and maintenance of cooperation is still an evolutionary riddle. In this context, ecological life-history traits which affect the efficiency of selection may play a role,…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
Immotile microbes inhabit nearly every environment on Earth, from soils and sediments to food matrices -- yet how they disperse through these physically confining environments is poorly understood. Here, we show that immotile microbial…
The study of immune system aging, i.e. immunosenescence, is a relatively new research topic. It deals with understanding the processes of immunodegradation that indicate signs of functionality loss possibly leading to death. Even though it…
Breast cancer incidence rises with age and peaks across the menopausal transition, yet why some postmenopausal lobules persist, and why that persistence predicts cancer risk, remains unresolved. Incomplete age-related lobular involution is…
Liquid mixtures of many interacting components often exhibit numerous coexisting types of droplets. An exciting example is the cytosol of biological cells, where diverse droplets, called condensates, are essential for cellular function.…
The ability to absorb mutations while retaining structure and function, or mutational robustness, is a remarkable property of natural proteins. In this Letter, we use a computational model of organismic evolution [Zeldovich et al, PLOS Comp…
Non-genetic forms of antimicrobial drug resistance can result from cell-to-cell variability that is not encoded in the genetic material. Data from recent studies also suggest that non-genetic mechanisms can facilitate the development of…
Bacteria can form a great variety of spatially heterogeneous cell density patterns, ranging from simple concentric rings to dynamical spiral waves appearing in growing colonies. These pattern formation phenomena are important as they…
We investigate a model of cell division in which the length of telomeres within the cell regulate their proliferative potential. At each cell division the ends of linear chromosomes change and a cell becomes senescent when one or more of…
In many adult tissues, stem cells and differentiated cells are not homogeneously distributed : stem cells are arranged in periodic "niches", and differentiated cells are constantly produced and migrate out of these niches. In this article,…
We present a simple model based on a reaction-diffusion equation to explain pattern formation in a multicellular bacterium (Streptomyces). We assume competition for resources as the basic mechanism that leads to pattern formation; in…