Escherichia coli BarA-UvrY regulates the pks island and kills Staphylococci via the genotoxin colibactin

Wound infections are often polymicrobial in nature and are associated with poor disease prognoses. Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus are among the top five most cultured pathogens from wound infections. However, little is known about the polymicrobial interactions between E. coli and S. aureus during wound infections. In this study, we show that E. coli kills S. aureus both in vitro and in a mouse excisional wound model via the genotoxin, colibactin. We also show that the BarA-UvrY two component system (TCS) is a novel regulator of the pks island, which acts through the carbon storage global regulatory (Csr) system. Together, our data demonstrate the role of colibactin in inter-species competition and show that it is regulated by BarA-UvrY TCS, a previously uncharacterized regulator of the pks island.

An Extension of Two Species Lotka-Volterra Competition Model

Limiting resource is a angular stone of the interactions between species in ecosystems such as competition, prey-predators and food chain systems. In this paper, we propose a planar system as an extension of Lotka-Voterra competition model. This describes? two competitive species for a single resource? which are affected by intra and inter-specific interference. We give its complete analysis for the existence and local stability of all equlibria and some conditions of global stability. The model exhibits a rich set of behaviors with a multiplicity of coexistence equilibria, bi-stability, tri-stability and occurrence of global stability of the exclusion of one species and the coexistence? equilibrium. The asymptotic behavior and the number of coexistence equilibria are shown by a saddle-node bifurcation of the level of resource under conditions on competitive effects relatively to associated growth rate per unit of resource.Moreover, we determine the competition outcome in the situations of Balanced and Unbalanced intra-inter species competition effects. Finally, we illustrate results by numerical simulations.

The Poisson-Lognormal Model as a Versatile Framework for the Joint Analysis of Species Abundances

Joint Species Distribution Models (JSDM) provide a general multivariate framework to study the joint abundances of all species from a community. JSDM account for both structuring factors (environmental characteristics or gradients, such as habitat type or nutrient availability) and potential interactions between the species (competition, mutualism, parasitism, etc.), which is instrumental in disentangling meaningful ecological interactions from mere statistical associations. Modeling the dependency between the species is challenging because of the count-valued nature of abundance data and most JSDM rely on Gaussian latent layer to encode the dependencies between species in a covariance matrix. The multivariate Poisson-lognormal (PLN) model is one such model, which can be viewed as a multivariate mixed Poisson regression model. Inferring such models raises both statistical and computational issues, many of which were solved in recent contributions using variational techniques and convex optimization tools. The PLN model turns out to be a versatile framework, within which a variety of analyses can be performed, including multivariate sample comparison, clustering of sites or samples, dimension reduction (ordination) for visualization purposes, or inferring interaction networks. This paper presents the general PLN framework and illustrates its use on a series a typical experimental datasets. All the models and methods are implemented in the R package PLNmodels, available from cran.r-project.org.

An Analysis of Chinese English Varieties from the Perspective of Eco-linguistics——A Case Study of Pidgin English

This paper focuses on the nativization of English in China, using Pidgin English as a case study to put Chinese English variants under the theoretical framework of eco-linguistics, and put the ecological environment such as species competition, coexistence and co-evolution, etc. The natural phenomenon is compared with the existence of language phenomenon in the development process of China English represented by Pidgin English.The study found that as the spark of the collision of the two mainstream languages of Chinese and English, the Chinese English varieties play a very important role in the exchange and enrichment of the two languages and cultures. Although academic circles have different attitudes and opinions on Chinese English variants, their existence and development conform to the law of the development of things and are also inevitable in historical development. Blindly ignoring their objective existence will definitely bring adverse effects on the ecological balance of the language. We should face up to the existence of Chinese English variants, comply with the law of language development, and allow it to develop naturally, and make efforts to protect the ecological balance of the world’s languages.

Hopf bifurcation in a reaction-diffusive-advection two-species competition model with one delay

In this paper, we investigate a reaction-diffusive-advection two-species competition model with one delay and Dirichlet boundary conditions. The existence and multiplicity of spatially non-homogeneous steady-state solutions are obtained. The stability of spatially nonhomogeneous steady-state solutions and the existence of Hopf bifurcation with the changes of the time delay are obtained by analyzing the distribution of eigenvalues of the infinitesimal generator associated with the linearized system. By the normal form theory and the center manifold reduction, the stability and bifurcation direction of Hopf bifurcating periodic orbits are derived. Finally, numerical simulations are given to illustrate the theoretical results.