Related papers: A host-parasite model for a two-type cell populati…
Most conspicuous organisms are multicellular and most multicellular organisms develop somatic cells to perform specific, non-reproductive tasks. The ubiquity of this division of labor suggests that it is highly advantageous. In this paper,…
We study a minimal stochastic individual-based model for a microbial population challenged by a persistent (lytic) virus epidemic. We focus on the situation in which the resident microbial host population and the virus population are in…
We present a systematic comparison and analysis of four discrete-time, host--parasitoid models. For each model, we specify that density-dependent effects occur prior to parasitism in the life cycle of the host. We compare density-dependent…
Segregation of populations is a key question in evolution theory. One important aspect is the relation between spatial organization and the population's composition. Here we study a specific example -- sectors in expanding bacterial…
Diseases emerge, persist and vanish in an ongoing battle for available hosts. Hosts, on the other hand, defend themselves by developing immunity that limits the ability of pathogens to reinfect them. We here explore a multi-disease system…
Mechanisms of immunity, and of the host-pathogen interactions in general are among the most fundamental problems of medicine, ecology, and evolution studies. Here, we present a microscopic, protein-level, sequence-based model of immune…
In this paper we study invasion probabilities and invasion times of cooperative parasites spreading in spatially structured host populations. The spatial structure of the host population is given by a random geometric graph on $[0,1]^n$,…
Network ecology is a rising field of quantitative biology representing ecosystems as complex networks. A suitable example is parasite spreading: several parasites may be transmitted among their hosts through different mechanisms, each one…
Establishing a quantitative connection between the population growth rate and the generation times of single cells is a prerequisite for understanding evolutionary dynamics of microbes. However, existing theories fail to account for the…
Two density-dependent branching processes are considered to model predator-prey populations. For both models, preys are considered to be the main food supply of predators. Moreover, in each generation the number of individuals of each…
We investigate the effects of cooperativity between contagion processes that spread and persist in a host population. We propose and analyze a dynamical model in which individuals that are affected by one transmissible agent $A$ exhibit a…
Transposons are small, self-replicating DNA sequences found in every branch of life. Often, one transposon will parasitize another, forming a tiny intracellular ecosystem. In some species these ecosystems thrive, while in others they go…
A multi-patch and multi-group modeling framework describing the dynamics of a class of diseases driven by the interactions between vectors and hosts structured by groups is formulated. Hosts' dispersal is modeled in terms of patch-residence…
We show that a certain model for the spread of an infection has a phase transition in the recuperation rate. The model is as follows: There are particles or individuals of type A and type B, interpreted as healthy and infected,…
In multicellular organisms, several cell states coexist. For determining each cell type, cell-cell interactions are often essential, in addition to intracellular gene expression dynamics. Based on dynamical systems theory, we propose a…
Males are often the "sicker" sex with male biased parasitism found in a taxonomically diverse range of species. There is considerable interest in the processes that could underlie the evolution of sex-biased parasitism. Mating system…
Multipartite viruses replicate through a puzzling evolutionary strategy. Their genome is segmented into two or more parts, and encapsidated in separate particles that appear to propagate independently. Completing the replication cycle,…
This article deals with the emergence of a specific mating preference pattern called homogamy in a population. Individuals are characterized by their genotype at two haploid loci, and the population dynamics is modelled by a non-linear…
More and more evidence shows that mating preference is a mechanism that may lead to a reproductive isolation event. In this paper, a haploid population living on two patches linked by migration is considered. Individuals are ecologically…
In this paper, we extend a model of host-parasite co-evolution to incorporate the semi-conservative nature of DNA replication for both the host and the parasite. We find that the optimal mutation rate for the semi-conservative and…