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Giant number fluctuations in microbial ecologies

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Title Giant number fluctuations in microbial ecologies
 
Creator DAS, D
DAS, D
PRASAD, A
 
Subject Population dynamics
Stochastic growth
Mutation
Lysis-lysogeny
Horizontal gene transfer
HORIZONTAL GENE-TRANSFER
BACTERIOPHAGE-LAMBDA
DECISION-MAKING
BACTERIAL
RESISTANCE
SIMULATION
INFECTION
ASSAY
 
Description Statistical fluctuations in population sizes of microbes may be quite large depending on the nature of their underlying stochastic dynamics. For example, the variance of the population size of a microbe undergoing a pure birth process with unlimited resources is proportional to the square of its mean. We refer to such large fluctuations, with the variance growing as square of the mean, as giant number fluctuations (GNF). Luria and Delbruck showed that spontaneous mutation processes in microbial populations exhibit GNF. We explore whether GNF can arise in other microbial ecologies. We study certain simple ecological models evolving via stochastic processes: (i) bi-directional mutation, (ii) lysis-lysogeny of bacteria by bacteriophage, and (iii) horizontal gene transfer (HGT). For the case of bidirectional mutation process, we show analytically exactly that the GNF relationship holds at large times. For the ecological model of bacteria undergoing lysis or lysogeny under viral infection, we show that if the viral population can be experimentally manipulated to stay quasi-stationary, the process of lysogeny maps essentially to one-way mutation process and hence the GNF property of the lysogens follows. Finally, we show that even the process of HGT may map to the mutation process at large times, and thereby exhibits GNF. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 
Publisher ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
 
Date 2014-10-16T15:02:29Z
2014-10-16T15:02:29Z
2012
 
Type Article
 
Identifier JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY, 30896-104
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2012.05.030
http://dspace.library.iitb.ac.in/jspui/handle/100/15852
 
Language en