Population dynamics articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Aedes aegypti transmit several arboviruses and control of the mosquito populations could be beneficial. Here the authors show that deletion of leucine aminopeptidase1 (LAP1) results in mitochondrial defects and abnormal autophagy in sperm, reducing fertility and fecundity of females. LAP1−/− males show no obvious defects in longevity and mating fitness.

    • Xiaomei Sun
    • , Xueli Wang
    •  & Zhen Zou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Abrupt regime shifts could in theory be predicted from early warning signals. Here, the authors show that true critical transitions are challenging to classify in lake planktonic systems, due to mismatches between trophic levels, and reveal uneven performance of early warning signal detection methods.

    • Duncan A. O’Brien
    • , Smita Deb
    •  & Christopher F. Clements

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Identifying memory and state switching in single cells remains elusive. Here, the authors develop a method, scMemorySeq, by combining cell barcoding and scRNA-seq and apply it to human melanoma cells to track lineages as they switch states between a drug-susceptible state and a state primed for drug resistance.

    • Guillaume Harmange
    • , Raúl A. Reyes Hueros
    •  & Sydney M. Shaffer

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Substandard and falsified medicines are a problem, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and effects on antimicrobial resistance development aren’t well understood. Here, the authors discuss mechanisms by which they can increase or decrease levels of resistance and the need for improved data collection and analytical approaches.

    • Sean Cavany
    • , Stella Nanyonga
    •  & Ben S. Cooper

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Keystone taxa in ecological communities are native taxa that have an especially important role in the stability of their ecosystem. This study introduces a novel method for detecting keystones in microbial communities by comparing data with and without specific species.

    • Guy Amit
    •  & Amir Bashan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In cancer, interactions between treatment-sensitive and resistant cells can influence the effectiveness of therapies. Here, the authors use experimental and mathematical models to explore interactions between ER+ breast cancer cell lineages that are sensitive or resistant to CDK4/6 inhibition, revealing the role of facilitative growth.

    • Rena Emond
    • , Jason I. Griffiths
    •  & Andrea H. Bild

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Predicting the evolution of engineered cell populations is an increasingly popular topic in biotechnology. Here the authors build a model that explores evolution in engineered cell populations which can generate hypotheses that could lead to important insights into strategies for assessing and mitigating the effects of evolution.

    • Duncan Ingram
    •  & Guy-Bart Stan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Current methods to assess circadian biological parameters can be labor intensive. Here, the authors establish a method for estimating circadian entrainment characteristics using simple experiments and mathematical modeling, revealing the responsiveness of circadian rhythms to diverse stimuli in the mammalian circadian clock.

    • Kosaku Masuda
    • , Naohiro Kon
    •  & Arisa Hirano

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plasmid acquisition imposes a transient burden on bacterial hosts. Here, authors show this burden results in a tradeoff between growth and lag that dictates plasmid fate, favoring intermediate cost plasmids over both low and high cost counterparts.

    • Mehrose Ahmad
    • , Hannah Prensky
    •  & Allison J. Lopatkin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phage-plasmids are bacterial extrachromosomal elements that act both as plasmids and as viruses. Here, Shan et al. show that segregational drift and loss-of-function mutations play key roles in the infection dynamics of a cosmopolitan phage-plasmid, allowing it to create continuous productive infections in marine bacteria.

    • Xiaoyu Shan
    • , Rachel E. Szabo
    •  & Otto X. Cordero

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, using Citrobacter rodentium colonization of mice as a model, the authors characterize the impact of pathogen dose on the number of bacteria that initiate infection in the mouse gut, providing a framework for quantifying the host bottlenecks that eliminate pathogens to protect from infection.

    • Ian W. Campbell
    • , Karthik Hullahalli
    •  & Matthew K. Waldor

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding the heterogeneity of growth, response to therapy and progression dynamics in metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) remains critical. Here, the authors analyse lesion-specific response heterogeneity in 4,308 mCRC patients and find that organ-level progression sequence is associated with long-term survival.

    • Jiawei Zhou
    • , Amber Cipriani
    •  & Yanguang Cao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many rodent species are known as hosts of zoonotic pathogens, but the ecological conditions that trigger spillover are not well-understood. Here, the authors show that population fluctuations and association with human-dominated habitats explain the zoonotic reservoir status of rodents globally.

    • Frauke Ecke
    • , Barbara A. Han
    •  & Richard S. Ostfeld

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using high-resolution stable isotope and microstructure analyses of otoliths, this study reveals that sardine populations in the western and eastern North Pacific have different early life metabolic and growth rates that respond contrastingly to temperature variations. These findings could explain observations of different responses in these populations to decadal-scale temperature anomalies.

    • Tatsuya Sakamoto
    • , Motomitsu Takahashi
    •  & Tomihiko Higuchi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A new study finds that city growth in the U.S. is spatially heterogeneous. Inter-city flows concentrate in core areas. Intra-city flows are generally directed towards external and low density counties of cities, and is the main contributor to urban sprawl.

    • Sandro M. Reia
    • , P. Suresh C. Rao
    •  & Satish V. Ukkusuri

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There are competing hypotheses for human herpes simplex virus 2’s migration out-of-Africa. Here, the authors sequence 65 new herpes simplex virus 2 genomes with a focus on under-sampled sub-Saharan African countries, suggesting an Eastern African origin for global dispersal the virus between 22-29 thousand years ago.

    • Jennifer L. Havens
    • , Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer
    •  & Joel O. Wertheim

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This mathematical modelling study projects the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 in England until the end of 2022 assuming that the Omicron BA.2 sublineage remains dominant. They show that booster vaccination was highly effective in mitigating severe outcomes and that future dynamics will depend greatly on assumptions about waning immunity.

    • Rosanna C. Barnard
    • , Nicholas G. Davies
    •  & W. John Edmunds

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Communities of microbes play important roles in natural environments and hold great potential for deploying division-of-labor strategies in synthetic biology and bioproduction. Here, in a community of two competing E. coli strains, the authors show that the relative abundances of the strains can be stabilized and steered dynamically with remarkable precision by coupling the cells to an automated computer-controlled feedback-loop.

    • Joaquín Gutiérrez Mena
    • , Sant Kumar
    •  & Mustafa Khammash

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pandemic control policy requires balancing economic and disease outcomes. This study develops a joint modeling approach that allows both aspects to be considered simultaneously and shows that targeted isolation is superior economically and can achieve similar disease outcomes to voluntary isolation or blanket lockdowns.

    • Thomas Ash
    • , Antonio M. Bento
    •  & Ana I. Bento

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quorum-sensing bacteria produce and secrete autoinducers that trigger a behavioral change in the population when reaching a certain threshold. Here, Bettenworth et al. show that autoinducer synthase gene expression in Sinorhizobium meliloti occurs in asynchronous stochastic pulses, and that physiological cues modulate pulse frequency and, consequently, response behavior dynamics. Frequency-modulated pulsing in autoinducer synthase gene expression thus represents a time-based mechanism for information integration and collective decision-making.

    • Vera Bettenworth
    • , Simon van Vliet
    •  & Anke Becker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Collateral sensitivity-based antibiotic treatments may have the potential to limit the emergence of antimicrobial resistance. Here, the authors use mathematical modelling to study the effects of pathogen- and drug-specific characteristics for different treatment designs on bacterial population dynamics and resistance evolution.

    • Linda B. S. Aulin
    • , Apostolos Liakopoulos
    •  & J. G. Coen van Hasselt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Habitat fragmentation and eutrophication have strong impacts on biodiversity but there is limited understanding of their cumulative impacts. This study presents simulations of meta-food-webs and provides a mechanistic explanation of how landscape heterogeneity promotes biodiversity through rescue and drainage effects.

    • Remo Ryser
    • , Myriam R. Hirt
    •  & Ulrich Brose

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ‘invariant rate of ageing’ hypothesis suggests that the rate of ageing tends to be constant within species. Here, Colchero et al. find support for the hypothesis across primates, including humans, suggesting biological constraints on the rate of ageing.

    • Fernando Colchero
    • , José Manuel Aburto
    •  & Susan C. Alberts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plant population growth rate is sensitive to annual temperature and precipitation anomalies. Here the authors analyse time series of population projection models from multiple biomes, finding a relationship between short generation times and strong demographic responses to climate—particularly precipitation—anomalies.

    • Aldo Compagnoni
    • , Sam Levin
    •  & Tiffany M. Knight

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Transmission by pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic viral carriers makes intervention and containment of the COVID-19 extremely challenging. Here, the authors construct an epidemiological model that focuses on transmission around the symptom onset, exploring specific transmission control measures.

    • Liang Tian
    • , Xuefei Li
    •  & Lei-Han Tang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In naturally occurring microbial systems, there is a positive relationship between species diversity and productivity of the community. Here the authors perform model selection to find potential amensal interactions that yield robust stable synthetic microbial consortia.

    • Behzad D. Karkaria
    • , Alex J. H. Fedorec
    •  & Chris P. Barnes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Temperature-dependent host–pathogen interactions may lead species to shift their thermal preferences under pathogen pressure. However, here the authors show that bats have not altered their microclimate preferences due to temperature-mediated mortality from white-nose syndrome, finding instead a sustained preference for warmer sites with high mortality.

    • Skylar R. Hopkins
    • , Joseph R. Hoyt
    •  & Kate E. Langwig

  • Article
    | Open Access

    According to Zipf’s law, the population size of a city is inversely proportional to its size rank in any urban system. The authors show how demography explains this law as a time average of balanced migration between cities and how deviations express information about people’s net preferences.

    • Luís M. A. Bettencourt
    •  & Daniel Zünd

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conservation biologists often assume that rare (or less abundant) species are more likely to be declining under anthropogenic change. Here, the authors synthesise population trend data for ~2000 animal species to show that population trends cover a wide spectrum of change from losses to gains, which are not related to species rarity.

    • Gergana N. Daskalova
    • , Isla H. Myers-Smith
    •  & John L. Godlee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Seasonal influenza epidemics vary in timing and size, but the causes of the variation remain unclear. Here, the authors analyse a 15-year city-level data set, and find that fluctuations in climatic factors do not predict onset timing, and that while antigenic change does not have a consistent effect on epidemic size, the timing of onset and heterosubtypic competition do.

    • Edward K. S. Lam
    • , Dylan H. Morris
    •  & Colin A. Russell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mutualism is typically portrayed as a destabilizing process in community ecology. Here, via a random matrix model that considers species density, the author shows that mutualistic interactions can, in fact, enhance population density at equilibrium and increase community resilience to perturbation.

    • Lewi Stone

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Extracting causality from time series on natural populations is challenging. Here the authors apply empirical dynamical modeling to 25 years of fish survey data from North Sea fisheries to quantify causal effects of age structure, abundance, and environment on population spatial variability, finding both common and species-specific patterns.

    • Jheng-Yu Wang
    • , Ting-Chun Kuo
    •  & Chih-hao Hsieh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Density-dependence is rarely accounted for in plant-plant facilitation studies. Here the authors develop a framework that incorporates density-dependence in the stress-gradient hypothesis, and test it first through modeling and then empirically on Arabidopsis thaliana along salt stress gradients.

    • Ruichang Zhang
    •  & Katja Tielbörger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Models of the origin of life generally require a mechanism to structure emerging populations. Here, Krieger et al. develop spatial models showing that coherent structures arising in turbulent flows in aquatic environments could have provided compartments that facilitated the origin of life.

    • Madison S. Krieger
    • , Sam Sinai
    •  & Martin A. Nowak

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Organisms living on and inside of plants—such as microbes and herbivorous insects—can interact in complex ways. Here the authors show that a plant virus increases the temperature of the plant and also the thermal tolerance of an aphid species feeding on the plant; this change in thermal tolerance also affects competition with another aphid species.

    • Mitzy F. Porras
    • , Carlos A. Navas
    •  & Tomás A. Carlo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    HIV prevalence varies throughout Africa, but the contribution of migration remains unclear. Using population-based data from ~22,000 persons, Grabowski et al. show that HIV-positive migrants selectively migrate to high prevalence areas and that out-migrants from these areas geographically disperse.

    • Mary Kate Grabowski
    • , Justin Lessler
    •  & Ronald H. Gray

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Market integration may loosen the dense kinship networks maintaining high fertility among agriculturalists, but data are lacking. Here, Colleran shows that in 22 rural Polish communities, women’s ego networks are less kin-oriented, but not less dense, as market integration increases, potentially enabling low fertility values to spread.

    • Heidi Colleran

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prior studies have examined fixed traits that correlate with plant invasiveness. Here the authors use a database of population matrices to compare demographic traits of invasive species in their native and invaded ranges, finding that demographic amplification is an important predictor of invasiveness.

    • Kim Jelbert
    • , Danielle Buss
    •  & Dave Hodgson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Swimming bacteria perform collective motion at high cell density, yet it is unclear how this behaviour affects their ability to follow substance gradients in the environment. Here, Colin et al. address this question by studying motion of Escherichia coli in controlled chemical gradients.

    • Remy Colin
    • , Knut Drescher
    •  & Victor Sourjik

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many species’ life cycles have moved earlier in the year because of climate change, but we do not know the consequences for range expansions. The authors show that these advances promote range expansions in species with multiple reproductive cycles per year, but not in species with only one.

    • Callum J. Macgregor
    • , Chris D. Thomas
    •  & Jane K. Hill

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Garden bird feeding is a prolific human activity that provides a reliable foraging opportunity to wild birds. Here the authors use a 40-year data set to show that large-scale restructuring of garden bird communities and growth in urban bird populations can be linked to changing feeding practices.

    • Kate E. Plummer
    • , Kate Risely
    •  & Gavin M. Siriwardena

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