Related papers: Slowing evolution is more effective than enhancing…
Since penicillin was discovered about 90 years ago, we have become used to using drugs to eradicate unwanted pathogenic cells. However, using drugs to kill bacteria, viruses or cancer cells has the serious side effect of selecting for…
We point out that a simple and generic strategy to lower the risk for extinction consists in the developing a dormant stage in which the organism is unable to multiply but may die. The dormant organism is protected against the poisonous…
The rise of antimicrobial drug resistance is an imminent threat to global health that has warranted, and duly received, considerable attention within the medical, microbiological and modelling communities. Outbreaks of drug-resistant…
One strategy for winning a coevolutionary struggle is to evolve rapidly. Most of the literature on host-pathogen coevolution focuses on this phenomenon, and looks for consequent evidence of coevolutionary arms races. An alternative…
One of the most challenging problems in microbiology is to understand how a small fraction of microbes that resists killing by antibiotics can emerge in a population of genetically identical cells, the phenomenon known as persistence or…
Tumor recurrence, driven by the evolution of drug resistance is a major barrier to therapeutic success in cancer. Resistance is often caused by genetic alterations such as point mutation, which refers to the modification of a single genomic…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…
When simulating biological populations under different evolutionary genetic models, backward or forward strategies can be followed. Backward simulations, also called coalescent-based simulations, are computationally very efficient. However,…
Resistance to insecticide is considered nowadays one of the major threats to insect control, as its occurrence reduces drastically the efficiency of chemical control campaigns, and may also perturb the application of other control methods,…
'Evolutionary rescue' is the potential for evolution to enable population persistence in a changing environment. Even with eventual rescue, evolutionary time lags can cause the population size to temporarily fall below a threshold…
The present and future of evolutionary algorithms depends on the proper use of modern parallel and distributed computing infrastructures. Although still sequential approaches dominate the landscape, available multi-core, many-core and…
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…
One strategy for winning a coevolutionary struggle is to evolve rapidly. Most of the literature on host-pathogen coevolution focuses on this phenomenon, and looks for consequent evidence of coevolutionary arms races. An alternative…
The question of why we age is a fundamental one. It is about who we are, and it also might have critical practical aspects as we try to find ways to age slower. Or to not age at all. Different reasons point at distinct strategies for the…
A looming challenge for agriculture is sustainable intensification of food production to feed the growing human population. Current chemical and genetic technologies used to manage plant diseases are highly vulnerable to pathogen evolution…
The preferred conditions for evolutionary innovation is a fundamental question, but little is known, in part because the question involves rare events. We focused on the potential role of polyploidy in the evolution of novel traits. There…
Using a set of heterogeneous competing systems with intra-system cooperation and inter-system aggression, we show how the coevolution of the system parameters (degree of organization and conditions for aggression) depends on the rate of…
Drug addiction is a complex and pervasive global challenge that continues to pose significant public health concerns. Traditional approaches to anti-addiction drug discovery have struggled to deliver effective therapeutics, facing high…
Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…
The optimization of dynamic problems is both widespread and difficult. When conducting dynamic optimization, a balance between reinitialization and computational expense has to be found. There are multiple approaches to this. In parallel…