Related papers: Antibiotic resistance: Insights from evolution exp…
Genetic interactions can strongly influence the fitness effects of individual mutations, yet the impact of these epistatic interactions on evolutionary dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the evolutionary role of…
During this last decade our knowledge of the evolutionary properties of stars has significantly improved. This result has been achieved thanks to our improved understanding of the physical behavior of stellar matter in the thermal regimes…
Interactions among living organisms, from bacteria colonies to human societies, are inherently more complex than interactions among particles and nonliving matter. Group interactions are a particularly important and widespread class,…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
We explore the commonalities between methods for assuring the security of computer systems (cybersecurity) and the mechanisms that have evolved through natural selection to protect vertebrates against pathogens, and how insights derived…
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally similar…
The adaptive immune system provides a diverse set of molecules that can mount specific responses against a multitude of pathogens. Memory is a key feature of adaptive immunity, which allows organisms to respond more readily upon…
A vast array of transformative technologies developed over the past decade has enabled measurement and perturbation at ever increasing scale, yet our understanding of many systems remains limited by experimental capacity. Overcoming this…
Nutrient limitation is one of the most common triggers of antibiotic tolerance and persistence. Here, we present two microfluidic setups to study how spatial and temporal variation in nutrient availability lead to increased survival of…
Antimicrobial resistance is a threat to public health with millions of deaths linked to drug resistant infections every year. To mitigate resistance, common strategies that are used are combination therapies and therapy switching. However,…
Many species of microbes cooperate by producing public goods from which they collectively benefit. However, these populations are under the risk of being taken over by cheating mutants that do not contribute to the pool of public goods.…
Molecular traits, such as gene expression levels or protein binding affinities, are increasingly accessible to quantitative measurement by modern high-throughput techniques. Such traits measure molecular functions and, from an evolutionary…
Bacteria pose unique challenges for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) because of strong structuring into distinct strains and substantial linkage disequilibrium across the genome. While methods developed for human studies can correct…
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…
The behaviour of individuals is a main actor in the control of the spread of a communicable disease and, in turn, the spread of an infectious disease can trigger behavioural changes in a population. Here, we study the emergence of the…
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,…
Biological datasets amenable to applied machine learning are more available today than ever before, yet they lack adequate representation in the Data-for-Good community. Here we present a work in progress case study performing analysis on…
We examine the feasibility of predicting and subsequently managing the future evolution of a Complex Adaptive System. Our archetypal system mimics a competitive population of mechanical, biological, informational or human objects. We show…
A key problem in modelling the evolution dynamics of infectious diseases is the mathematical representation of the mechanism of transmission of the contagion. Models with a finite number of subpopulations can be described via systems of…
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…