Related papers: Endogenous versus Exogenous Origins of Diseases
The adaptive immune system relies on diversity of its repertoire of receptors to protect the organism from a great variety of pathogens. Since the initial repertoire is the result of random gene rearrangement, binding of receptors is not…
The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
Epistasis describes the phenomenon that mutations at different loci do not have independent effects with regard to certain phenotypes. Understanding the global epistatic landscape is vital for many genetic and evolutionary theories. Current…
Robustness to perturbation is a key topic in the study of complex systems occurring across a wide variety of applications from epidemiology to biochemistry. Here we analyze the eigenspectrum of the Jacobian matrices associated to a general…
The study of infectious disease has been of interest to ecologists since long. The initiation of epidemic and the long term disease dynamics are largely influenced by the nature of the underlying consumer (host)-resource dynamics.…
Complex diseases are caused by a multitude of factors that may differ between patients. As a result, hypothesis tests comparing all patients to all healthy controls can detect many significant variables with inconsequential effect sizes. A…
Experimental studies of microbial communities routinely reveal that they have multiple stable states. While each of these states is generally resilient, certain perturbations such as antibiotics, probiotics and diet shifts, result in…
The sustainable use of multicomponent treatments such as combination therapies, combination vaccines/chemicals, and plants carrying multigenic resistance requires an understanding of how their population-wide deployment affects the speed of…
The vertebrate adaptive immune system provides a flexible and diverse set of molecules to neutralize pathogens. Yet, viruses such as HIV can cause chronic infections by evolving as quickly as the adaptive immune system, forming an…
Advances in healthcare and in the quality of life significantly increase human life expectancy. With the ageing of populations, new un-faced challenges are brought to science. The human body is naturally selected to be well-functioning…
The immune response is a dynamic process by which the body determines whether an antigen is self or nonself. The state of this dynamic process is defined by the relative balance and population of inflammatory and regulatory actors which…
During infectious disease epidemics, pathogen transmission occurs in host populations made up of interacting subpopulations. Using stochastic simulation and analytical approximations, we examine how outbreak sizes in networked populations…
We study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
A key scientific challenge during the outbreak of novel infectious diseases is to predict how the course of the epidemic changes under different countermeasures that limit interaction in the population. Most epidemiological models do not…
Many of the chemical reactions that take place within a living cell are irreversible. Due to evolutionary pressures, the number of allowable reactions within these systems are highly constrained and thus the resulting metabolic networks…
We present an SI epidemic model whereby a continuous variable captures variability in proliferative potential and resistance to infection among susceptibles. The occurrence of heritable, spontaneous changes in these phenotype and the…
Human mobility, contact patterns, and their interplay are key aspects of our social behavior that shape the spread of infectious diseases across different regions. In the light of new evidence and data sets about these two elements,…
A biological system achieve homeostasis when there is a regulated quantity that is maintained within a narrow range of values. Here we consider homeostasis as a phenomenon of network dynamics. In this context, we improve a general theory…
Artificial immune system can be used to generate schedules in changing environments and it has been proven to be more robust than schedules developed using a genetic algorithm. Good schedules can be produced especially when the number of…