Related papers: Speciation due to hybrid necrosis in plant-pathoge…
Consider the following stochastic model for immune response. Each pathogen gives birth to a new pathogen at rate $\lambda$. When a new pathogen is born, it has the same type as its parent with probability $1 - r$. With probability $r$, a…
Understanding how a diversity of plants in agroecosystems affects the adaptation of pathogens in a key issue in agroecology. We analyze PDE systems describing the dynamics of adaptation of two phenotypically structured populations, under…
The immune system normally protects the human host against death by infection. However, when an immune response is mistakenly directed at self antigens, autoimmune disease can occur. We describe a model of protein evolution to simulate the…
We investigate the problem of speciation and coexistence in simple ecosystems when the competition among individuals is included in the Eigen model for quasi-species. By suggesting an analogy between the competition among strains and the…
In ecological systems heterogeneous interactions between pathogens take place simultaneously. This occurs, for instance, when two pathogens cooperate, while at the same time multiple strains of these pathogens co-circulate and compete.…
The spread of infectious disease and the evolution of antigenically distinct strains are often modeled separately, despite strong feedbacks mediated by host immune memory and heterogeneous contacts. To tackle this challenging problem, we…
We propose a hybrid dynamical system approach to model the evolution of a pathogen that experiences different selective pressures according to a stochastic process. In every environment, the evolution of the pathogen is described by a…
Zoonotic disease transmission between animals and humans is a growing risk and the agricultural context acts as a likely point of transition, with individual heterogeneity acting as an important contributor. Thus, understanding the dynamics…
Many emerging pathogens infect multiple host species, and multi-host pathogens may have very different dynamics in different host species. This research addresses how pathogen replication rates and Immune System (IS) response times are…
The protein-protein interaction (PPI) network provides an overview of the complex biological reactions vital to an organism's metabolism and survival. Even though in the past PPI network were compared across organisms in detail, there has…
All genes interact with other genes, and their additive effects and epistatic interactions affect an organism's phenotype and fitness. Recent theoretical and empirical work has advanced our understanding of the role of multi-locus…
One of the most challenging issues of evolutionary biology concerns speciation, the emergence of new species from an initial one. The huge amount of species found in nature demands a simple and robust mechanism. Yet, no consensus has been…
Mechanisms leading to speciation are a major focus in evolutionary biology. In this paper, we present and study a stochastic model of population where individuals, with type a or A, are equivalent from ecological, demographical and spatial…
We demonstrate that Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) networks in several eucaryotic organisms contain significantly more self-interacting proteins than expected if such homodimers randomly appeared in the course of the evolution. We also…
We consider the general problem of sensitive and specific discrimination between biochemical species. An important instance is immune discrimination between self and not-self, where it is also observed experimentally that ligands just below…
The process of speciation, where an ancestral species divides in two or more new species, involves several geographic, environmental and genetic components that interact in a complex way. Understanding all these elements at once is…
A classical view of speciation is that reproductive isolation arises as a by-product of genetic divergence. Here, individual-based simulations are used to evaluate whether the mechanisms implied by this view may result in rapid speciation…
Modes of speciation have been the subject of a century's debate. Traditionally, most speciations are believed to be caused by spatial separation of populations (allopatry). Recent observations (Meyer 1990, Schliewen 1994, Schliewen 2001,…
The capacity of proteins to interact specifically with one another underlies our conceptual understanding of how living systems function. Systems-level study of specificity in protein-protein interactions is complicated by the fact that the…
The emergence of cross species interactions at protein level is a part of molecular mechanisms that lead to parasitic diseases. Comprehensive modelling can capture such interactions and could be useful to understand their pathophysiology…