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The increasing spread of COVID-19, caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, raises concerns about the extent to which mutations have occurred across the viral genome. We present a partial replication of an earlier 2021 study by Wang, R. et al. that…
Over the past 150 years, vaccines have revolutionized the relationship between people and disease. During the COVID-19 pandemic, technologies such as mRNA vaccines have received attention due to their novelty and successes. However, more…
Ribonucleic acids (RNA) are unique in that they can store genetic information, replicate and perform catalysis. Importantly, RNA molecules are highly dynamic, and thus determining the ensemble of conformations that they populate is crucial…
A theory on the conformation transition for SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (S) is proposed. The conformation equilibrium between open (up) and closed (down) conformations of receptor binding domain (RBD) of the spike is studied from the…
The SARS CoV-2 virus emerged at the end of 2019 and rapidly developed several mutated variants, specifically the Delta and Omicron, which demonstrate higher infectivity and escalating infection cases worldwide. The dominant transmission…
One regards spaces of trees as stratified spaces, to study distributions of phylogenetic trees. Stratified spaces with may have cycles, however spaces of trees with a fixed number of leafs are contractible. Spaces of trees with three leafs,…
Dynamical processes exhibiting absorbing states are essential in the modeling of a large variety of situations from material science to epidemiology and social sciences. Such processes exhibit the possibility of avalanching behavior upon…
Although lessons have been learned from previous severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) outbreaks, the rapid evolution of the viruses means that future outbreaks of a much larger scale are…
In individual SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks, the count of confirmed cases and deaths follow a Gompertz growth function for locations of very different sizes. This lack of dependence on region size leads us to hypothesize that virus spread depends on…
In light of the continuous transmission and evolution of SARS-CoV-2 coupled with a significant decline in clinical testing, there is a pressing need for scalable, cost-effective, long-term, passive surveillance tools to effectively monitor…
Single-stranded (ss) RNA viruses self-assemble spontaneously in solutions that contain the viral RNA genome molecules and the viral capsid proteins. The self-assembly of empty capsids can be understood on the basis of free energy…
In the 21st century, several emergent viruses have posed a global threat. Each pathogen has emphasized the value of rapid and scalable vaccine development programs. The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has made the importance of such efforts…
With the rapid spread of COVID-19 worldwide, viral genomic data is available in the order of millions of sequences on public databases such as GISAID. This Big Data creates a unique opportunity for analysis towards the research of effective…
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, has caused 60 millions of infections and 1.38 millions of fatalities. Genomic analysis of SARS-CoV-2 can provide insights on drug design and vaccine…
Models are often employed to integrate knowledge about epidemics across scales and simulate disease dynamics. While these approaches have played a central role in studying the mechanics underlying epidemics, we lack ways to reliably predict…
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emergence began in late 2019 and has since spread rapidly worldwide. The characteristics of respiratory immune response to this emerging virus is not clear. Recently,…
We estimate the reduction in transmission of SARS-CoV-2 achievable by surveillance testing of a susceptible population at different frequencies, comparing the cases of both the original Wuhan strain and the Delta variant. We estimate the…
The outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has become a worldwide public health crisis. When the SARS-CoV-2 enters the biological fluids in the human body,…
Identifying the relative importance of the different transmission routes of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is an urgent research priority. To that end, the different transmission routes, and their role in determining the evolution of the Covid-19…
With the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) across the globe and its continuous mutation, it is of pivotal importance to design a system to identify different known (and unknown) variants of SARS-CoV-2. Identifying particular…