Speakers
Description
Bacterial populations can be well-mixed free swimming planktonic communities, or as microbial aggregates with spatial structure, including biofilms, granules or flocks, single cell layers, and microbial biozones with increased biomass density relative to their bulk environment, etc. In applications (e.g environmental, biotechnological), such populations often consist of a large number of cells, such that a continuum description is appropriate.
The complexity of bacterial processes is rendered by the mathematical complexity of models describing them. Usually the models also depend on limiting nutrients, inhibitory stressors, signal molecules, etc. When no spatial structure needs to be accounted for, this often leads to ODE models (the simplest scenario, but possibly with many parameters and state variables). When spatial effects play a role as well, also terms describing bacterial movement and substrate transport need to be included. For example, in biofilm reactor models one often has a system of ODEs for the reactor itself, coupled to a free boundary value problem for a 1st order nonlocal nonlinear hyperbolic balance equation for the biofilm, coupled in turn to a semilinear two point boundary value problem for dissolved substances. Other models contain nonlinear degenerate diffusion terms, or complicated interactions with the physical environment.
In this minisymposium the focus will be on novel applications of such modeling frameworks for bacterial populations.
