What triggers bacterial division? Mathematical modelling and inference for bacterial population dynamics
A talk in the FSPM-Kolloquium series by
Marie Doumic from Paris
| Abstract: | What triggers the bacterial division? To answer this question, several types of mathematical models have been built, studied, and more recently compared to experimental data on growing and dividing bacterial population. This is the field of structured population equations and stochastic processes, which knows a long-lasting interest for more than sixty years, leading to much progress in their mathematical understanding. They have been developed to describe a population dynamics in terms of well-chosen traits, assumed to characterize well the individual behaviour. More recently, thanks to the huge progress in experimental measurements, the question of estimating the parameters from population measurements also attracts a growing interest, since it finally allows to compare model and data, and thus to validate - or invalidate - the "structuring" character of the variable. However, the so-called structuring variable may be quite abstract ("maturity", "satiety"...), and/or not directly measurable, whereas the quantities effectively measured may be linked to the structuring one in an unknown or intricate manner. We can thus formulate a general question: is it possible to estimate the dependence of a population on a given variable, which is not experimentally measurable, by taking advantage of the measurement of the dependence of the population on another - experimentally quantified - variable? In this talk, we give first hints to answer this question, addressing it first in a specific setting, namely the growth and division of bacteria, and focus on a specific recently introduced model, the so-called "increment of size"-structured equation, where the division depends on the increment of size between birth and division. Within the CRC this talk is associated to the project(s): C1 |