Phase transitions in microbial lineage trees

TL;DR

This paper explores phase transitions in microbial populations, linking statistical physics to biological behavior, and demonstrates a first-order phase transition in bacterial plasmid stability.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous demonstration of phase transitions in microbial dynamics and establishes a lower bound on plasmid stability in populations.

Findings

Existence of a first-order phase transition in bacterial plasmid models

A strict lower bound on the number of plasmids maintained in a population

Connection between population behavior and underlying physics principles

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.