Speaker
Description
Some bacteria can divide as fast as every 20 minutes in a good condition, while when the condition becomes too severe, the cells can enter dormancy where the division stops. The cells may tolerate the non-growing condition for days, and restart the growth when the environment improves again. Interestingly, very often, even if the environment allows the growth of the cells, a subpopulation of them may stay/become dormant. A dormant sub-population appears useless at the first sight, but those cells are often more tolerant to stresses lethal to growing cells, such as antibiotics. In this talk, we discuss a mathematical model to describe bacterial dormancy and analyze the optimal strategy for the bacteria population under the feast-famine cycle with a stochastic application of antibiotics.
