相关论文: Genetic drift suppresses bacterial conjugation in …

It is widely accepted that population genetics theory is the cornerstone of evolutionary analyses. Empirical tests of the theory, however, are challenging because of the complex relationships between space, dispersal, and evolution.…

Culturing cells confined in microscale geometries has been reported in many studies this last decade, in particular following the development of microfluidic-based applications and lab-on-a-chip devices. Such studies usually examine growth…

Microbial colonies cultured on agar Petri dishes have become a model system to study biological evolution in populations expanding in space. Processes such as clonal segregation and gene surfing have been shown to be affected by…

A biological competition model where the individuals of the same species perform a two-dimensional Markovian continuous-time random walk and undergo reproduction and death is studied. The competition is introduced through the assumption…

We present a generic mechanism by which reproducing microorganisms, with a diffusivity that depends on the local population density, can form stable patterns. It is known that a decrease of swimming speed with density can promote separation…

Geographic structure can affect patterns of genetic differentiation and speciation rates. In this article, we investigate the dynamics of genetic distances in a geographically structured metapopulation. We model the metapopulation as a…

Bacteria are known to exchange genetic information by horizontal gene transfer. Since the frequency of homologous recombination depends on the similarity of recombining segments, several studies examined whether this could lead to the…

Various bacterial strains (e.g. strains belonging to the genera Bacillus, Paenibacillus, Serratia and Salmonella) exhibit colonial branching patterns during growth on poor semi-solid substrates. These patterns reflect the bacterial…

Many questions that we have about the history and dynamics of organisms have a geographical component: How many are there, and where do they live? How do they move and interbreed across the landscape? How were they moving a thousand years…

This paper develops a mathematical model describing the influence that conjugation-mediated Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) has on the mutation-selection balance in an asexually reproducing population of unicellular, prokaryotic organisms.…

Gene drives have the potential to rapidly replace a harmful wild-type allele with a gene drive allele engineered to have desired functionalities. However, an accidental or premature release of a gene drive construct to the natural…

Bacteria, in contrast to eukaryotic cells contain two types of genes: chromosomal genes that are fixed to the cell, and plasmids that are mobile genes, easily shared to other cells. The sharing of plasmid genes between individual bacteria…

We study a three-species cyclic game system where organisms face a contagious disease whose virulence may change by a pathogen mutation. As a responsive defence strategy, organisms' mobility is restricted to reduce disease dissemination in…

While bacterial swimming has been well characterized in uniform liquid environments, only little is known about how bacteria propagate through complex environments, such as gel-like matrices or porous media that are typically encountered in…

Theory predicts rapid genetic drift during invasions, yet many expanding populations maintain high genetic diversity. We find that genetic drift is dramatically suppressed when dispersal rates increase with the population density because…

Models of strategy evolution on static networks help us understand how population structure can promote the spread of traits like cooperation. One key mechanism is the formation of altruistic spatial clusters, where neighbors of a…

The transition from localized to systemic spreading of bacteria, viruses and other agents is a fundamental problem that spans medicine, ecology, biology and agriculture science. We have conducted experiments and simulations in a simple…

The development of multicellular organisms relies on the precise coordination of molecular events across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Understanding how information flows from molecular interactions to cellular processes and tissue…

Unraveling the evolutionary forces shaping bacterial diversity can today be tackled using a growing amount of genomic data. While the genome of eukaryotes is highly stable, bacterial genomes from cells of the same species highly vary in…

A key question in evolution is how likely a mutant is to take over. This depends on natural selection and on stochastic fluctuations. Population spatial structure can impact mutant fixation probabilities. We introduce a model for structured…