Related papers: Similarity Is Not Enough: Tipping Points of Ebola …
Mathematical modelling has successfully been used to provide quantitative descriptions of many viral infections, but for the Ebola virus, which requires biosafety level 4 facilities for experimentation, modelling can play a crucial role.…
Forecasting the change in the distribution of viral variants is crucial for therapeutic design and disease surveillance. This task poses significant modeling challenges due to the sharp differences in virus distributions across…
Antibody therapeutics and vaccines are among our last resort to end the raging COVID-19 pandemic. They, however, are prone to over 5,000 mutations on the spike (S) protein uncovered by a Mutation Tracker based on over 200,000 genome…
As South and Central American countries prepare for increased birth defects from Zika virus outbreaks and plan for mitigation strategies to minimize ongoing and future outbreaks, understanding important characteristics of Zika outbreaks and…
Tuberculosis (TB) continues to pose a major public health challenge, particularly in high-burden regions such as Ethiopia, necessitating a more profound understanding of its transmission dynamics. In this study, we developed an SVEITRS…
Since December 2020, variants of COVID-19 (especially Delta and Omicron) appeared with different characteristics that influenced death and transmissibility emerged around the world. To address the novel dynamics of the disease, we propose a…
Influenza A is a serious disease that causes significant morbidity and mortality, and vaccines against the seasonal influenza disease are of variable effectiveness. In this paper, we discuss use of the $p_{\rm epitope}$ method to predict…
The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern endangers the long-term control of COVID-19, especially in countries with limited genomic surveillance. In this work, we explored genomic drivers of contagion in Chile. We sequenced 3443…
The emergence of diseases such as Zika and Ebola has highlighted the need to understand the role of sexual transmission in the spread of diseases with a primarily non-sexual transmission route. In this paper we develop a number of…
Background: During 2021 several new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus appeared with both increased levels of transmissibility and virulence with respect to the original wild variant. The Delta (B.1.617.2) variation, first seen in India,…
We propose a simple model with two infective classes in order to model the cholera epidemic in Haiti. We include the impact of environmental events (rainfall, temperature and tidal range) on the epidemic in the Artibonite and Ouest regions…
Motivated by recent outbreaks of the Ebola Virus, we are concerned with the role that a vector reservoir plays in supporting the spatio-temporal spread of a highly lethal disease through a host population. In our context, the reservoir is a…
Dengue and Zika incidence data and the latest research have raised questions about how dengue vaccine strategies might be impacted by the emergence of Zika virus. Existing antibodies to one virus might temporarily protect or promote…
Here we study how mutations which change physical properties of cell proteins (stability) impact population survival and growth. In our model the genotype is presented as a set of N numbers, folding free energies of cells N proteins.…
The increase in the connectivity between hosts in recent times has facilitated the emergence of more aggressive mutant viral strains, making their containment and eradication significantly more challenging compared to the original variants.…
After more than 6 million deaths worldwide, the ongoing vaccination to conquer the COVID-19 disease is now competing with the emergence of increasingly contagious mutations, repeatedly supplanting earlier strains. Following the near-absence…
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…
Coalescent theory combined with statistical modeling allows us to estimate effective population size fluctuations from molecular sequences of individuals sampled from a population of interest. When sequences are sampled serially through…
Nearly neutral theory predicts that evolutionary processes will differ in small populations compared to large populations, a key point of concern for endangered species. The nearly-neutral threshold, the span of neutral variation, and the…
In Costa Rica, the first known cases of Zika were reported in 2016. We looked at the 2016-2017 Zika outbreak and explored the transmission dynamics using weekly reported data. A nonlinear differential equation single-outbreak model with…