Related papers: Bacterial persistence: a winning strategy?
Bacterial growth environment strongly influences the efficacy of antibiotic treatment, with slow growth often being associated with decreased susceptibility. Yet in many cases the connection between antibiotic susceptibility and pathogen…
We propose and analyze a model for antibiotic resistance transfer in a bacterial biofilm and examine antibiotic dosing strategies that are effective in bacterial elimination. In particular, we consider a 1-D model of a biofilm with…
Comparing future antibiotic resistance levels resulting from different antibiotic treatments is challenging because some patients may survive only under one of the antibiotic treatments. We embed this problem within a semi-competing risks…
Mutation rate is a key determinant of the pace as well as outcome of evolution, and variability in this rate has been shown in different scenarios to play a key role in evolutionary adaptation and resistance evolution under stress caused by…
We consider a mutation-selection model of a population structured by the spatial variables and a trait variable which is the diffusion rate. Competition for resource is local in spatial variables, but nonlocal in the trait variable. We…
The body is home to a diverse microbiota, mainly in the gut. Resistant bacteria are selected for by antibiotic treatments, and once resistance becomes widespread in a population of hosts, antibiotics become useless. Here, we develop a…
The current survey paper concerns stochastic mathematical models for the spread of infectious diseases. It starts with the simplest setting of a homogeneous population in which a transmittable disease spreads during a short outbreak.…
We provide a brief overview of both Bayes and classical model selection. We argue tentatively that model selection has at least two major goals, that of finding the correct model or predicting well, and that in general both these goals may…
A stochastic model, describing the growth of two competing infections on $\mathbb{R}^d$, is introduced. The growth is driven by outbursts in the infected region, an outburst in the type 1 (2) infected region transmitting the type 1 (2)…
Within many bacterial colonies, persister cells exist as a subpopulation that is tolerant to antibiotics and other stressors, yet not genetically distinct from the rest of the colony. A recent study has proposed epigenetic inheritance as a…
Bacterial populations that colonize a host play important roles in host health, including serving as a reservoir that transmits to other hosts and from which invasive strains emerge, thus emphasizing the importance of understanding rates of…
When confronted with an undesired cell population, such as bacterial infections or tumors, we seek the most effective treatment, designed to eliminate the population as rapidly as possible. A common practice is to monitor the cells…
Phenotypic heterogeneity is a strategy commonly used by bacteria to rapidly adapt to changing environmental conditions. Here, we study the interplay between phenotypic heterogeneity and genetic diversity in spatially extended populations.…
We propose a compartmental model for epidemiology wherein the population is split into groups with either comply or refuse to comply with protocols designed to slow the spread of a disease. Parallel to the disease spread, we assume that…
We study a stochastic spatial model of biological competition in which two species have the same birth and death rates, but different diffusion constants. In the absence of this difference, the model can be considered as an off-lattice…
In this paper we study the diffusion of an SIS-type epidemics on a network under the presence of a random environment, that enters in the definition of the infection rates of the nodes. Accordingly, we model the infection rates in the form…
While the mechanisms and quantitative details are complex, few analysts would doubt that antibiotic use increases the prevalence of drug-resistant bacterial pathogens among all bacteria causing disease in a population. The causal connection…
The transition from localized to systemic spreading of bacteria, viruses and other agents is a fundamental problem that spans medicine, ecology, biology and agriculture science. We have conducted experiments and simulations in a simple…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…
Run-and-tumble is a common but vital strategy that bacteria employ to explore environment suffused with boundaries, as well as to escape from entrapment. In this study we reveal how this strategy and the resulting dynamical behavior can be…