Drug efficacy measured using pure cultures is not maintained in the presence of neighbouring microbes. Using simple physical laws, I pinpoint the mechanism for this change to demonstrate that drug efficacy can be predictably manupulated, and suggest why microbes began to co-operate and form communities.
The link between fitness and reproduction rate is a central tenet in evolutionary biology: mutants reproducing faster than the dominant wild-type are favoured by selection, otherwise the mutation is lost. This link is given by Fisher's theorem under …
Tradeoffs between life history traits impact diverse biological phenomena, including the maintenance of biodiversity. We sought to study two canonical tradeoffs in a model host-parasite system consisting of bacteriophage lambda and _Escherichia …
Fisher suggested advantageous genes would spread through populations as a wave so we sought genetic waves in evolving populations, as follows. By fusing a fluorescent marker to a drug efflux protein (AcrB) whose expression provides _Escherichia coli_ …
The abundance of AcrAB-TolC protein seldom correlates with the number copies of _acr_ operons in _Escherichia coli_. The regulation of this efflux pump is complex, so to understand this phenomenon I modelled its entire regulatory network.
For decades it was hypothesised that the growth rate of populations and their size engage in a trade-off, but the data was always inconclusive. Using bacteria, we set off to underpin a physical mechanism for this trade-off, and then explain why it is not always found in the data.
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Mathematically speaking, it is self-evident that the optimal control of complex, dynamical systems with many interacting components cannot be achieved with ‘non-responsive’ control strategies that are constant through time. Although there are notable …