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The increase in the connectivity between hosts in recent times has facilitated the emergence of more aggressive mutant viral strains, making their containment and eradication significantly more challenging compared to the original variants.…
Viruses evolve in the background of host immune systems that exert selective pressure and drive viral evolutionary trajectories. This interaction leads to different evolutionary patterns in antigenic space. Examples observed in nature…
We study the emergence of cell differentiation under the assumption of the existence of a given number of tradeoffs between genes encoding different functions. In the model the viability of colonies is determined by the capability of their…
The emergence or adaptation of pathogens may lead to epidemics, highlighting the need for a thorough understanding of pathogen evolution. The tradeoff hypothesis suggests that virulence evolves to reach an optimal transmission intensity…
Antigenic variation is the main immune escape mechanism for RNA viruses like influenza or SARS-CoV-2. While high mutation rates promote antigenic escape, they also induce large mutational loads and reduced fitness. It remains unclear how…
We consider the dynamics of a virus spreading through a population that produces a mutant strain with the ability to infect individuals that were infected with the established strain. Temporary cross-immunity is included using a time delay,…
Cellular populations such as avascular tumors and microbial biofilms may "invade" or grow into surrounding populations. The invading population is often comprised of a heterogeneous mixture of cells with varying growth rates. The population…
RNA virus populations will undergo processes of mutation and selection resulting in a mixed population of viral particles. High throughput sequencing of a viral population subsequently contains a mixed signal of the underlying clones. We…
Ecological resilience refers to the ability of a system to retain its state when subject to state variables perturbations or parameter changes. While understanding and quantifying resilience is crucial to anticipate the possible regime…
Cross-protection, which refers to a process whereby artificially inoculating a plant with a mild strain provides protection against a more aggressive isolate of the virus, is known to be an effective tool of disease control in plants. In…
Chronic viral infections can persist in an infected person for decades. From the perspective of the virus, a single infection can span thousands of generations, leading to a highly diverse population of viruses with its own complex…
We study the evolution of recombination using a microscopic model developed within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits. Two components of fitness are considered: a static one that describes adaptation to environmental factors not…
Viruses display striking diversity in structure, transmission mode, immune interaction, and evolutionary behavior. Despite this diversity, viral strategies are not unconstrained. Here we present a unifying framework that treats viral…
Population dynamics and evolutionary genetics underly the structure of ecosystems, changing on the same timescale for interacting species with rapid turnover, such as virus (e.g. HIV) and immune response. Thus, an important problem in…
Interactions among multiple infectious agents are increasingly recognized as a fundamental issue in the understanding of key questions in public health, regarding pathogen emergence, maintenance, and evolution. The full description of…
Complex microbial habitats see the spatial competition of different clonal bacterial populations that switch between different phenotypes. Here, we determine the effect of this subpopulation structure on the invasion of one species by…
We consider a model for a population in a heterogeneous environment, with logistic type local population dynamics, under the assumption that individuals can switch between two different nonzero rates of diffusion. Such switching behavior…
The problem of unicellular-multicellular transition is one of the main issues that is discussing in evolutionary biology. In [1] the fitness of a colony of cells is considered in terms of its two basic components, viability and fecundity.…
The coexistence of different viral strains (quasispecies) within the same host are nowadays observed for a growing number of viruses, most notably HIV, Marburg and Ebola, but the conditions for the formation and survival of new strains have…
How will the novel coronavirus evolve? I study a simple epidemiological model, in which mutations may change the properties of the virus and its associated disease stochastically and antigenic drifts allow new variants to partially evade…