Publications by authors named "Yuya Karita"
Article Synopsis
- Crowding effects significantly influence the organization and evolution of densely populated cellular structures like biofilms and tumors by altering how cells interact during growth and division.
- Recent research indicates that while crowding affects natural selection, its impact on the fate of rare genetic variants is less understood; this study reveals how crowding influences the genetic diversity in expanding microbial colonies.
- The findings demonstrate that most mutations occur behind the growth front, resulting in distinct clone-size distributions that reflect their position relative to the growing edge, ultimately providing insights into mutation rates and growth dynamics in crowded environments.
Scale-dependent tipping points of bacterial colonization resistance.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
February 2022
Bacteria are efficient colonizers of a wide range of secluded microhabitats, such as soil pores, skin follicles, or intestinal crypts. How the structural diversity of these habitats modulates microbial self-organization remains poorly understood, in part because of the difficulty to precisely manipulate the physical structure of microbial environments. Using a microfluidic device to grow bacteria in crypt-like incubation chambers of systematically varied lengths, we show that small variations in the physical structure of the microhabitat can drastically alter bacterial colonization success and resistance against invaders.
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