Microorganisms play a pivotal role in corrosion processes, exerting profound effects on the integrity of metallic surfaces across agricultural machinery, transportation infrastructure, and energy systems, leading to substantial economic losses and environmental risks. Depending on the species and environmental context, microbial activity can either accelerate or inhibit corrosion, making their...
Subaerial biofilms (SABs) are microbial communities on air-exposed surfaces that play key roles in biogeochemical cycling and deterioration of built heritage. Their activity and persistence strongly depend on environmental conditions, particularly moisture and carbon availability. A mathematical framework is presented to investigate SAB dynamics and ecology. The model describes SABs as thin...
Microbial-induced corrosion (MIC) and biodegradation in marine environments are driven by complex microbial consortia whose metabolic activity controls chemical transformations at material surfaces. In this presentation, we present a mathematical framework describing the interaction among microbial functional groups and their role in degradation processes. The model is applied to the...
Mercury methylation is a microbially mediated process that occurs in anaerobic soils, sediments, and at the water-sediment interface. Sulfur-reducing bacteria (SRB) uptake substrates, namely sulfate and dissolved organic carbon for growth, and transform inorganic mercury into methylmercury. Methylmercury is the most abundant and toxic organic mercury compound that bio-accumulates in tissues...
In marine environments,bacterial biofilm formation occurs on the surface of plumes of marine snow that serve as moving nutrient hotspots.We develop a mathematical model on bacterial biofilm study that accounts for biomass growth,surface attachment-detachment,diffusive and directed movement of planktonic bacteria and perform a numerical simulation study.The biomass density controls the spatial...
Many bacterial species employ quorum sensing as a communication
mechanism to coordinate collective behaviours such as pathogenicity or
major lifestyle transitions. Gene regulatory networks govern these
processes, that typically involve coupled positive and negative feedback
loops, giving rise to nonlinear dynamics and, under suitable conditions,
bi- or multistability. Additionally,...
The global rise in antimicrobial resistance levels, coupled with the downturn in discovery of new antibiotics, has resulted in an urgent need for novel ways to tackle bacterial infections. Most antibiotics work by accumulating inside bacterial cells, but bacteria have evolved mechanisms to prevent prolonged intracellular exposure to toxic substances including by limiting the permeability of...
We present a mathematical model based on a system of partial differential equations (PDEs) with cross-diffusion and reaction terms to describe ecological interactions between multiple bacterial species and substrates within microaggregates, where bacteria proliferate in response to substrate availability and undergo passive dispersal driven by population pressure gradients. The ecological...
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...
