相关论文: Phenotypic switching can speed up biological evolu…

Phase variation, or stochastic switching between alternative states of gene expression, is common among microbes, and may be important in coping with changing environments. We use a theoretical model to assess whether such switching is a…

Clonal microbes can switch between different phenotypes and recent theoretical work has shown that stochastic switching between these subpopulations can stabilize microbial communities. This phenotypic switching need not be stochastic,…

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…

In biology phenotypic switching is a common bet-hedging strategy in the face of uncertain environmental conditions. Existing mathematical models often focus on periodically changing environments to determine the optimal phenotypic response.…

In microbial communities, each species often has multiple, distinct phenotypes, but studies of ecological stability have largely ignored this subpopulation structure. Here, we show that such implicit averaging over phenotypes leads to…

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…

Complex microbial habitats see the spatial competition of different clonal bacterial populations that switch between different phenotypes. Here, we determine the effect of this subpopulation structure on the invasion of one species by…

Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…

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.…

Fluctuating environments pose tremendous challenges to bacterial populations. It is observed in numerous bacterial species that individual cells can stochastically switch among multiple phenotypes for the population to survive in rapidly…

Genetically identical cells in the same population can take on phenotypically variable states, leading to differentiated responses to external signals, such as nutrients and drug-induced stress. Many models and experiments have focused on a…

Under low concentrations of antibiotics causing DNA damage, \textit{Escherichia coli} bacteria can trigger stochastically a stress response known as the SOS response. While the expression of this stress response can make individual cells…

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…

Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…

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…

Response time-delay is an ubiquitous phenomenon in biological systems. Here we use a simple stochastic population model with time-delayed switching-rate conversion to quantitatively study the biological influence of the response time-delay…

Within the framework of population genetics we consider the evolution of an asexual haploid population under the effect of a rapidly varying natural selection (microevolution). We focus on the case in which the environment exerting…

Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…

Biological systems must be robust for stable function against perturbations, but robustness alone is not sufficient. The ability to switch between appropriate states (phenotypes) in response to different conditions is essential for…

The adaptation rate in theoretical models of biological evolution increases with the mutation rate but only to a point when mutations into lethal states cause extinction. One would expect that removing such states should be beneficial for…