Spatio-temporal dynamics of microbial population under nutrient-limiting conditions

Abstract

The physiological structure of microbial communities in natural environments is typically a response to changes in internal and external conditions. External conditions may include the availability of nutrients, and the presence of inhibiting or toxic substances while internal conditions may include cell to cell interactions. In this paper, we present and investigate a spatio-temporal bacterioplankton-nutrient interaction model that takes into account the quiescent stage. First, we investigate the temporal submodel to establish conditions under which microbial population oscillations may occur. Furthermore, we establish the existence of traveling wavefronts for the proposed reaction-diffusion model. A qualitative study of the proposed numerical scheme is presented and simulations are provided to support our theoretical results.