Related papers: Antibiotic resistance: Insights from evolution exp…
Bacterial growth presents many beautiful phenomena that pose new theoretical challenges to statistical physicists, and are also amenable to laboratory experimentation. This review provides some of the essential biological background,…
This work introduces a new statistical physics lattice model of bacteria interacting with anti-microbial drugs that can reproduce qualitative features of resistance emergence and whose model parameters and outputs can be measured with…
Many real-world optimization problems occur in environments that change dynamically or involve stochastic components. Evolutionary algorithms and other bio-inspired algorithms have been widely applied to dynamic and stochastic problems.…
Diseases caused by bacteria have been a threat to human civilisation for centuries. Despite the availability of numerous antibacterial drugs today, bacterial diseases continue to pose life-threatening challenges. The credit for this goes to…
We consider the class of SIS epidemic models in which a large population of individuals chooses whether to adopt protection or to remain unprotected as the epidemic evolves. For a susceptible individual, adopting protection reduces the…
This brief discusses evolutionary game theory as a powerful and unified mathematical tool to study evolution of collective behaviours. It summarises some of my recent research directions using evolutionary game theory methods, which include…
The abrupt outbreak and transmission of biological diseases has always been a long-time concern of humankind. For long, mathematical modeling has served as a simple and yet efficient tool to investigate, predict, and control spread of…
Skin and soft tissue infections (SSTIs) are among the most frequently observed diseases in ambulatory and hospital settings. Resistance of diverse bacterial pathogens to antibiotics is a significant cause of severe SSTIs, and treatment…
Recent research has extended methods from the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics into other disciplines. Most notably, one recent work creates a unified theoretical framework to understand evolutionary biology, machine…
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…
Bacterial populations often have complex spatial structures, which can impact their evolution. Here, we study how spatial structure affects the evolution of antibiotic resistance in a bacterial population. We consider a minimal model of…
The challenge in controlling stochastic systems in which low-probability events can set the system on catastrophic trajectories is to develop a robust ability to respond to such events without significantly compromising the optimality of…
Immunological systems have been an abundant inspiration to contemporary computer scientists. Problem solving strategies, stemming from known immune system phenomena, have been successfully applied to challenging problems of modern computing…
This chapter gives a synopsis of recent approaches to model and analyse the evolution of microbial populations under selection. The first part reviews two population genetic models of Lenski's long-term evolution experiment with Escherichia…
This manuscript introduces a new analytical approach for studying the time evolution of disease spread on a finite size network. Our methodology can accommodate any disease with a general infectivity profile. This new approach is able to…
We investigate the evolutionary rescue of a microbial population in a gradually deteriorating environment, through a combination of analytical calculations and stochastic simulations. We consider a population destined for extinction in the…
In past work, we developed a computational model of the evolution of symbiotic entities (Model-S), based on Conway's Game of Life. In this article, we examine three trends that biologists have observed in the evolution of symbiotes. (1)…
People's cooperation in adopting protective measures is effective in epidemic control and creates herd immunity as a public good. Similarly, the presence of an epidemic is a driving factor for the formation and improvement of cooperation.…
Pathogenic bacteria present a large disease burden on human health. Control of these pathogens is hampered by rampant lateral gene transfer, whereby pathogenic strains may acquire genes conferring resistance to common antibiotics. Here we…
This article explores mathematical models for understanding the evolution of contagious diseases. The most widely known set of models are the compartmental ones, which are based on a set of differential equations. But these are not the only…