173 citations · 609 across the 20 of their papers we have counts for
20 papers
Emergent competition shapes the ecological properties of multi-trophic ecosystems
Zhijie Feng, Robert Marsland, Jason W. Rocks +1
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theo…
Cross-feeding shapes both competition and cooperation in microbial ecosystems
Pankaj Mehta, Robert Marsland
Recent work suggests that cross-feeding -- the secretion and consumption of metabolic biproducts by microbes -- is essential for understanding microbial ecology. Yet how cross-feed…
Tregs self-organize into a "computing ecosystem" and implement a sophisticated optimization algorithm for mediating immune response
Robert Marsland, Owen Howell, Andreas Mayer +1
Regulatory T cells (Tregs) play a crucial role in mediating immune response. Yet an algorithmic understanding of the role of Tregs in adaptive immunity remains lacking. Here, we pr…
Data-driven modeling reveals a universal dynamic underlying the COVID-19 pandemic under social distancing
Robert Marsland, Pankaj Mehta
We show that the COVID-19 pandemic under social distancing exhibits universal dynamics. The cumulative numbers of both infections and deaths quickly cross over from exponential gro…
Niche theory for mutualism: A graphical approach to plant-pollinator network dynamics
Fernanda S. Valdovinos, Robert Marsland
Contemporary Niche Theory is a useful framework for understanding how organisms interact with each other and with their shared environment. Its graphical representation, popularize…
Effect of resource dynamics on species packing in diverse ecosystems
Wenping Cui, Robert Marsland, Pankaj Mehta
The competitive exclusion principle asserts that coexisting species must occupy distinct ecological niches (i.e. the number of surviving species can not exceed the number of resour…
Machine Learning as Ecology
Owen Howell, Cui Wenping, Robert Marsland +1
Machine learning methods have had spectacular success on numerous problems. Here we show that a prominent class of learning algorithms - including Support Vector Machines (SVMs) --…
A minimal model for microbial biodiversity can reproduce experimentally observed ecological patterns
Robert Marsland, Wenping Cui, Pankaj Mehta
Surveys of microbial biodiversity such as the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) and the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) have revealed robust ecological patterns across different enviro…
The Community Simulator: A Python package for microbial ecology
Robert Marsland, Wenping Cui, Joshua Goldford +1
Natural microbial communities contain hundreds to thousands of interacting species. For this reason, computational simulations are playing an increasingly important role in microbi…
The Minimum Environmental Perturbation Principle: A New Perspective on Niche Theory
Robert Marsland, Wenping Cui, Pankaj Mehta
Fifty years ago, Robert MacArthur showed that stable equilibria optimize quadratic functions of the population sizes in several important ecological models. Here, we generalize thi…
The Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation in Biochemical Oscillations
Robert Marsland, Wenping Cui, Jordan M. Horowitz
Living systems regulate many aspects of their behavior through periodic oscillations of molecular concentrations, which function as `biochemical clocks.' These clocks are intrinsic…
Constrained optimization as ecological dynamics with applications to random quadratic programming in high dimensions
Pankaj Mehta, Wenping Cui, Ching-Hao Wang +1
Quadratic programming (QP) is a common and important constrained optimization problem. Here, we derive a surprising duality between constrained optimization with inequality constra…
Available energy fluxes drive a transition in the diversity, stability, and functional structure of microbial communities
Robert Marsland, Wenping Cui, Joshua Goldford +3
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special concep…
Active regeneration unites high- and low-temperature features in cooperative self-assembly
Robert Marsland, Jeremy England
Cytoskeletal filaments are capable of self-assembly in the absence of externally supplied chemical energy, but the rapid turnover rates essential for their biological function requ…
Limits of Predictions in Thermodynamic Systems: A Review
Robert Marsland, Jeremy England
The past twenty years have seen a resurgence of interest in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, thanks to advances in the theory of stochastic processes and in their thermodynamic inter…
Far-from-Equilibrium Distribution from Near-Steady-State Work Fluctuations
Robert Marsland, Jeremy England
A longstanding goal of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics has been to extend the conceptual power of the Boltzmann distribution to driven systems. We report some new progress tow…
Statistical Physics of Adaptation
Nikolai Perunov, Robert Marsland, Jeremy England
All living things exhibit adaptations that enable them to survive and reproduce in the natural environment that they inhabit. From a biological standpoint, it has long been underst…
Ambiguities in order-theoretic formulations of thermodynamics
Robert Marsland, Harvey R. Brown, Giovanni Valente
Since the 1909 work of Carathéodory, formulations of thermodynamics have gained ground which highlight the role of the the binary relation of adiabatic accessibility between equili…
Spin-velocity correlations of optically pumped atoms
R. Marsland, B. H. McGuyer, B. A. Olsen +1
We present efficient theoretical tools for describing the optical pumping of atoms by light propagating at arbitrary directions with respect to an external magnetic field, at buffe…
Collision Kernels from Velocity-Selective Optical Pumping with Magnetic Depolarization
T. Bhamre, R. Marsland, I. K. Kominis +2
We experimentally demonstrate how magnetic depolarization of velocity-selective optical pumping can be used to single out the collisional cusp kernel best describing spin and veloc…