Phase transitions in microbial lineage trees
Kaan Öcal, Syrine Ghrabli, Michael P. H. Stumpf
TLDR
This paper demonstrates how phase transitions arise in microbial populations, linking them to genealogies and setting a lower bound for stable plasmid maintenance.
Key contributions
- Shows how phase transitions naturally emerge in microbial population dynamics.
- Highlights the direct connection between these phase transitions and microbial genealogies.
- Rigorously demonstrates a first-order phase transition in a bacterial plasmid engineering model.
- Establishes a strict lower bound for the number of plasmids stably maintained in a population.
Why it matters
This research bridges statistical physics and microbial biology by showing how phase transitions govern population behavior. It offers a rigorous framework for understanding complex population dynamics and has practical implications for fields like bacterial plasmid engineering, ensuring stable genetic elements.
Original Abstract
Statistical physics can describe the behavior of microbial populations consisting of many heterogeneous individuals. A direct consequence is the existence of phase transitions, where the behavior of a population changes discontinuously upon a small perturbation. While such phase transitions have often been proposed in biology, connecting observed behavior to the underlying physics has remained challenging. We show how phase transitions naturally arise in microbial population dynamics and highlight their connection with genealogies. We rigorously demonstrate the existence of a first-order phase transition in a model of bacterial plasmid engineering and find a strict lower bound on the number of plasmids that can be stably maintained in a population.
📬 Weekly AI Paper Digest
Get the top 10 AI/ML arXiv papers from the week — summarized, scored, and delivered to your inbox every Monday.