Regensburg 2010 – wissenschaftliches Programm

Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Downloads | Hilfe

BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 35: Posters: Statistical Physics, Evolution, and Networks

BP 35.11: Poster

Donnerstag, 25. März 2010, 17:15–20:00, Poster B2

The influence of spatial correlations and fractal properties of bacterial patterns on colony extinction — •Florentine Mayer and Erwin Frey — Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics (ASC) and Center for NanoScience (CeNS), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Theresienstrasse 37, D-80333 München, Germany

Bacterial communities represent complex and dynamic ecological systems. They appear in the form of free-floating bacteria as well as biofilms in nearly all parts of our environment. They are highly relevant for human health and disease. Spatial patterns arise from heterogeneities of the underlying landscape or are self-organized by the bacterial interactions, and play an important role in maintaining species diversity. We investigate mechanisms for extinction of the population with our automaton model for a bacterial biofilm in fluctuating environments, where each bacterium can take two different phenotypes, whose growth and death rates depend on the environmental conditions. Employing stochastic simulations we find that the typical time until extinction occurs depends on the system size. We study the maximum of cluster mass over time during an extinction process. Furthermore the fractal properties of the patterns that existed before the extinction are characterized in regard to their influence on the extinction behaviour.