11/19/2023 0 Comments Microcosm biology"Ecological engineering and self-organization". "Diversity peaks at intermediate productivity in a laboratory microcosm". Kassen, Rees Buckling, Angus Bell, Graham Rainey, Paul B."Community assembly in the presence of disturbance: a microcosm experiment". Biosphere 2 - Controversial project with a 1.27 ha artificial closed ecological system in Oracle, Arizona (USA).Odum was a pioneer in his use of small closed and open ecosystems in classroom teaching. A Winogradsky column is an example of a microbial microcosm. Microcosm studies can be very useful to study the effects of disturbance or to determine the ecological role of key species. Open or closed microcosms provide an experimental area for ecologists to study natural ecological processes. Microcosms are artificial, simplified ecosystems that are used to simulate and predict the behaviour of natural ecosystems under controlled conditions. ( March 2011) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. "Biofilms will grow and be very sturdy, sometimes in places that we don't want them, whether that's in patients with disease that are immunocompromised, or in water treatment plants, or on the hulls of ships.This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. "We're motivated to study them because they intersect with the human world," says Asp. "Bacterial organisms, by biomass, are the most predominant life form on the earth," says Patteson, acknowledging this overlap in interest with Welch, from whose lab they procured the strains of bacteria. We don't exactly know why in the case of the biofilms, but it makes sense that they're able to exert more force and move faster." "It makes sense, in a way," says Patteson, "if you tried to climb a sticky wall instead of a slippery wall, you could exert more force on it. Indeed, by mapping the stress, the team was able to show how biofilms exert more pressure on a stiff surface than on a softer one. Unlike with the less controllable agar, Patteson's team can now make calculations to measure the forces that the biofilms are putting on the gels. "We study mechanics and soft matter systems, so we have equations that describe how something deforms under certain amounts of stress," says Patteson. "We typically think of biofilms as really slow-growing things, but if they're on something soft, they can actually disrupt it." This has implications for disease it means that tissue damage during and following infection might not just be caused by reactions of the body's immune system, but from the bacteria exerting strain on it.īesides design and manipulation of the gels, Patteson and Asp apply physics to biology in the ways that they process the images, measure the boundaries of the biofilms, and calculate how quickly the boundaries expand. "One of the things we found is that when a biofilm grows out, it's actually strong enough to exert force on the substrate," Patteson continues. To the right, a mathematical model of an elastic solid is used to calculate the stress exerted by the bacteria. The left image depicts how each small part of the hydrogel moved based on the movement of embedded fluorescent beads. "We're able to probe how much deformation the gel undergoes under a certain amount of strain," says Patteson. Instead, Patteson's team synthesized transparent gel substrates that could be tuned to a specific stiffness, that would allow them to take time-lapse videos of bacterial colonies growing on them. "Are they sensing the solid part or the fluid part?" she asks. "We call it a complex material because it is a solid but has properties like a fluid." This mixture of properties, she explains, means that teasing out exactly which aspects make the bacteria behave a certain way more difficult. "It's a substance popular in culinary applications because it makes things gelatinous and adds texture," says Patteson. In the past, scientists investigating this question typically grew the colonies on gels made from agar, an extract of red algae. Patteson and her team wanted to investigate what makes a biofilm-or a colony of microorganisms that bond together-grow and flourish on some kinds of surfaces but not others. In a paper published by PNAS Nexus, a new journal from Oxford Academic, she and graduate student Merrill Asp, along with the collaboration of Professor Roy Welch of the biology department, describe the surprising findings from their recent work with bacterial colonies, that has potential to help shape further understanding of all living systems and improve outcomes in medicine and health.
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