Related papers: Coevolutionary immune system dynamics driving path…
The adaptive and innate branches of the vertebrate immune system work in close collaboration to protect organisms from harmful pathogens. As an organism ages its immune system undergoes immunosenescence, characterized by declined…
Biological organisms have evolved a wide range of immune mechanisms to defend themselves against pathogens. Beyond molecular details, these mechanisms differ in how protection is acquired, processed and passed on to subsequent generations…
The evolutionary dynamics of human Influenza A virus presents a challenging theoretical problem. An extremely high mutation rate allows the virus to escape, at each epidemic season, the host immune protection elicited by previous…
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…
We model the immune surveillance of a pathogen which passes through $n$ immunologically distinct stages. The biological parameters of this system induce a partial order on the stages, and this, in turn, determines which stages will be…
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…
The dynamics of epidemic spreading is often reduced to the single control parameter $R_0$, whose value, above or below unity, determines the state of the contagion. If, however, the pathogen evolves as it spreads, $R_0$ may change over…
Organisms have evolved immune systems that can counter pathogenic threats. The adaptive immune system in vertebrates consists of a diverse repertoire of immune receptors that can dynamically reorganize to specifically target the…
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…
We study some simple mathematical models designed to test the following hypothesis: can a pathogen escape the immune system only because of its high probability of mutation? We propose both spatial and non-spatial models. In all of our…
Human pathogens transmitted through environmental pathways are subject to stress and pressures outside of the host. These pressures may cause pathogen pathovars to diverge in their environmental persistence and their infectivity on an…
We consider a stochastic model for a pathogen population in the presence of an immune response, in which pathogen types are partially ordered by ancestry and the immune system must eliminate ancestor types before it can eliminate their…
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.…
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…
Viruses like influenza have long coevolved with host immune systems, gradually shaping the evolutionary trajectory of these pathogens. Host immune systems develop immunity against circulating strains, which in turn avoid extinction by…
We develop a new structured compartmental model for the coevolutionary dynamics between susceptible and infectious individuals in heterogeneous SI epidemiological systems. In this model, the susceptible compartment is structured by a…
Many pathogens spread primarily via direct contact between infected and susceptible hosts. Thus, the patterns of contacts or contact network of a population fundamentally shapes the course of epidemics. While there is a robust and growing…
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…
In the studies of dynamics of pathogens and their interactions with a host immune system, an important role is played by the structure of antigenic variants associated with a pathogen. Using the example of a model of antigenic variation in…
The immune response to a pathogen has two basic features. The first is the expansion of a few pathogen-specific cells to form a population large enough to control the pathogen. The second is the process of differentiation of cells from an…