Jeroen Meijer

Hi! I’m Jeroen, a Phd candidate at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, working in metagenomics lab of Bas Dutilh and modeling group of Paulien Hogeweg, both part of the Theoretical Biology and Bioinformatics group.

It’s a bit empty here right now, but in the meantime here’s a pretty movie of crossfeeding microbes:

This movie shows two cross-feeding strains of digital organisms (left panel, shown in blue and yellow) that evolved from a single, metabolically self-sufficient ancestor. Each strain evolved to produce one of two essential metabolites (shown in right panel; blue strains produce yellow metabolites and yellow strains produce blue metabolites) and depends on the other strain for the missing metabolite. Due to limited diffusion of metabolites in the environment, growth rates (indicated with brightness in the left panel) are higher where microbes are close to their partner strain, resulting in self-mixing of the two strains. Movie by Bram van Dijk. Interested? Read more about Virtual Microbes and the evolution of metabolic dependence.