Dresden 2009 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 17: Poster II

BP 17.37: Poster

Mittwoch, 25. März 2009, 17:15–19:45, P3

Survival of heterogenous populations in fluctuating environments — •Florentine Mayer and Erwin Frey — Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics and CeNS, Department of Physics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Theresienstr. 37, 80333 München

Organisms must rapidly adapt to fluctuating environments to survive. In bacterial populations this is often achieved by phenotypic diversity, where bacteria can switch between different phenotypic states. Survival of the population can increase if each of these phenotypes is adapted to different environmental conditions. We investigate a spatial cellular automaton model for a bacterial biofilm, where each bacterium can take two different phenotypes, whose growth and death rates depend on the environmental conditions. Employing stochastic simulations we explore the spatio-temporal dynamics of the population and the ensuing stationary states. We find a transition between an active and an absorbing state, which is characterized by a probability distribution for extinction times with an anomalous long time tail. Further properties of the stationary states, such as the cluster size and cluster mass distribution are analyzed in detail.