Search results for "Ecological and Evolutionary Science"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Collective Viral Spread Mediated by Virion Aggregates Promotes the Evolution of Defective Interfering Particles
2020
Recent insights have revealed that viruses use a highly diverse set of strategies to release multiple viral genomes into the same target cells, allowing the emergence of beneficial, but also detrimental, interactions among viruses inside infected cells. This has prompted interest among microbial ecologists and evolutionary biologists in studying how collective dispersal impacts the outcome of viral infections. Here, we have used vesicular stomatitis virus as a model system to study the evolutionary implications of collective dissemination mediated by viral aggregates, since this virus can spontaneously aggregate in the presence of saliva. We find that saliva-driven aggregation has a dual ef…
Simulating multilevel dynamics of antimicrobial resistance in a membrane computing model
2019
Membrane computing is a bio-inspired computing paradigm whose devices are the so-called membrane systems or P systems. The P system designed in this work reproduces complex biological landscapes in the computer world. It uses nested “membrane-surrounded entities” able to divide, propagate, and die; to be transferred into other membranes; to exchange informative material according to flexible rules; and to mutate and be selected by external agents. This allows the exploration of hierarchical interactive dynamics resulting from the probabilistic interaction of genes (phenotypes), clones, species, hosts, environments, and antibiotic challenges. Our model facilitates analysis of several aspects…
Transcriptional Rewiring, Adaptation, and the Role of Gene Duplication in the Metabolism of Ethanol of Saccharomyces cerevisiae
2020
Ethanol is the main by-product of yeast sugar fermentation that affects microbial growth parameters, being considered a dual molecule, a nutrient and a stressor. Previous works demonstrated that the budding yeast arose after an ancient hybridization process resulted in a tier of duplicated genes within its genome, many of them with implications in this ethanol “produce-accumulate-consume” strategy. The evolutionary link between ethanol production, consumption, and tolerance versus ploidy and stability of the hybrids is an ongoing debatable issue. The implication of ancestral duplicates in this metabolic rewiring, and how these duplicates differ transcriptionally, remains unsolved. Here, we …
Erratum for Piwosz et al., "Light and Primary Production Shape Bacterial Activity and Community Composition of Aerobic Anoxygenic Phototrophic Bacter…
2020
Metabolic coupling between phytoplankton and bacteria determines the fate of dissolved organic carbon in aquatic environments, and yet how changes in the rate of primary production affect the bacterial activity and community composition remains understudied. Here, we experimentally limited the rate of primary production either by lowering light intensity or by adding a photosynthesis inhibitor. The induced decrease had a greater influence on bacterial respiration than on bacterial production and growth rate, especially at an optimal light intensity. This suggests that changes in primary production drive bacterial activity, but the effect on carbon flow may be mitigated by increased bacteria…
Black Queen Evolution and Trophic Interactions Determine Plasmid Survival after the Disruption of the Conjugation Network
2018
Bacterial antibiotic resistance is often a part of mobile genetic elements that move from one bacterium to another. By interfering with the horizontal movement and the maintenance of these elements, it is possible to remove the resistance from the population. Here, we show that a so-called plasmid-dependent bacteriophage causes the initially resistant bacterial population to become susceptible to antibiotics. However, this effect is efficiently countered when the system also contains a predator that feeds on bacteria. Moreover, when the environment contains antibiotics, the survival of resistance is dependent on the resistance mechanism. When bacteria can help their contemporaries to degrad…