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Aquaculture is pivotal for global food security but faces significant challenges from infectious diseases, particularly those caused by Streptococcus species such as Streptococcus iniae and Streptococcus agalactiae. These pathogens induce…
The study of infectious disease has been of interest to ecologists since long. The initiation of epidemic and the long term disease dynamics are largely influenced by the nature of the underlying consumer (host)-resource dynamics.…
As pathogens spread in a population of hosts, immunity is built up and the pool of susceptible individuals is depleted. This generates selective pressure, to which many human RNA viruses, such as influenza virus or SARS-CoV-2, respond with…
Infectious pathogens often propagate by superspreading, which focusses onward transmission on disproportionately few infected individuals. At the same time, infector-infectee pairs tend to have more similar transmission potentials than…
We investigate a stochastic individual-based model for the population dynamics of host-virus systems where the microbial hosts may transition into a dormant state upon contact with virions, thus evading infection. Such a contact-mediated…
Pest and disease classification is a challenging issue in agriculture. The performance of deep learning models is intricately linked to training data diversity and quantity, posing issues for plant pest and disease datasets that remain…
In a highly simplified view, a disease can be seen as the phenotype emerging from the interplay of genetic predisposition and fluctuating environmental stimuli. We formalize this situation in a minimal model, where a network (representing…
Selective control in a population is the ability to control a member of the population while leaving the other members relatively unaffected. The concept of selective control is developed using cell death or apoptosis in heterogeneous cell…
Global climate change has reduced crop resilience and pesticide efficacy, making reliance on synthetic pesticides inevitable, even though their widespread use poses significant health and environmental risks. While these pesticides remain a…
Plant breeding underpins global food security through incremental, accumulating improvements in crop yield, quality and sustainability, achieved via repeated cycles of crop ranking, selection and crossing. Climate change disrupts this…
Patterns of nestedness and specialization asymmetry, where specialist species interact mainly with generalists while generalists interact with both generalists and specialists, are often observed in mutualistic and antagonistic bi-partite…
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…
This thesis investigates the use of problem-specific knowledge to enhance a genetic algorithm approach to multiple-choice optimisation problems.It shows that such information can significantly enhance performance, but that the choice of…
Cooperation and competition between pathogens can alter the amount of individuals affected by a co-infection. Nonetheless, the evolution of the pathogens' behavior has been overlooked. Here, we consider a co-evolutionary model where the…
Mosquito-borne diseases cause significant public health burden, mostly in tropical and sub-tropical regions, and are widely emerging or re-emerging in areas where previously absent. Understanding, predicting, and mitigating the spread of…
Metapopulation models are commonly used in ecology, evolution, and epidemiology. These models usually entail homogeneity assumptions within patches and study networks of migration between patches to generate insights into conservation of…
Drug resistance is a serious public health problem that threatens to thwart our ability to treat many infectious diseases. Repeatedly, the introduction of new drugs has been followed by the evolution of resistance. In principle there are…
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…
Applying agrochemicals is the default procedure for conventional weed control in crop production, but has negative impacts on the environment. Robots have the potential to treat every plant in the field individually and thus can reduce the…
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,…