A lifecycle model for simulating bacterial evolution

Abstract

This paper presents a lifecycle model (LCM) to simulate bacterial evolution from a finite population of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. The potential of this approach is in relating the microscopic behaviors of single bacterial cell to the macroscopic effects of bacterial colonies. This can be accomplished via use of an individual-based modeling method under the framework of agent-environment-rule (AER). Here, our study focuses on investigating the behaviors at different developmental stages in E. coli lifecycle and developing a new biologically inspired methodology for static or dynamic systems. The experimental results through a varying environment demonstrates that our model can be used to study under which circumstances a certain bacterial behaviors emerges, and also give an inspiration to design a new biological optimization algorithm being used for optimization problems. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.