Related papers: Bacteriophage effect on parasitism resistance
Males are often the "sicker" sex with male biased parasitism found in a taxonomically diverse range of species. There is considerable interest in the processes that could underlie the evolution of sex-biased parasitism. Mating system…
In this paper we study invasion probabilities and invasion times of cooperative parasites spreading in spatially structured host populations. The spatial structure of the host population is given by a random geometric graph on $[0,1]^n$,…
Development of the new antimicrobial agents against antibiotic resistance pathogens is the nowadays challenge. Antimicrobial peptides (AMP) occur as important defence agents in many organisms and offer a viable alternative to conventional…
We address in this paper a new computational biology problem that aims at understanding a mechanism that could potentially be used to genetically manipulate natural insect populations infected by inherited, intra-cellular parasitic…
In freshwater ecosystems, aquatic insects that ontogenetically shift their habitat from aquatic to terrestrial play vital roles as prey subsidies that move nutrients and energy from aquatic to terrestrial food webs. As a result, these…
One of the challenges in epidemiology is to account for the complex morphological structure of hosts such as plant roots, crop fields, farms, cells, animal habitats and social networks, when the transmission of infection occurs between…
Phage therapy is an alternative treatment method for bacterial infections. It has shown particular promise in reducing bacterial load while preventing antibiotic resistance. Here, we develop a mathematical model of a bacterial infection…
As the development of new classes of antibiotics slows, bacterial resistance to existing antibiotics is becoming an increasing problem. A potential solution is to develop treatment strategies with an alternative mode of action. We consider…
Flagellar-driven locomotion plays a critical role in bacterial attachment and colonization of surfaces, contributing to the risks of contamination and infection. Tremendous attempts to uncover the underlying principles governing bacterial…
Insects like dragonflies and cicadas possess nanoprotusions on their wings that rupture bacterial membranes upon contact, inspiring synthetic antibacterial surfaces mimicking this phenomenon. Designing such biomimetic surfaces requires…
Dictyostelium discoideum is an ideal organism to test the pathogenicity of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, since its eukaryote nature allows for comparisons to be made to human health. Additionally, D. discoideum naturally feeds on bacteria and has…
An ongoing challenge in the mathematical modeling of biological aggregations is to strengthen the connection between models and biological data by quantifying the rules that individuals follow. We model aggregation of the pea aphid,…
Bacterial resistance to antibiotic treatment is a huge concern: introduction of any new antibiotic is shortly followed by the emergence of resistant bacterial isolates in the clinic. This issue is compounded by a severe lack of new…
The entrapment of bacteria near boundary surfaces is of biological and practical importance, yet the underlying physics is still not well understood. We demonstrate that it is crucial to include a commonly neglected entropic effect arising…
We present a novel model that describes the within-host evolutionary dynamics of parasites undergoing antigenic variation. The approach uses a multi-type branching process with two types of entities defined according to their relationship…
In ecological systems heterogeneous interactions between pathogens take place simultaneously. This occurs, for instance, when two pathogens cooperate, while at the same time multiple strains of these pathogens co-circulate and compete.…
The aim of this paper is to study two models for a bacterial population subject to antibiotic treatments. It is known that some bacteria are sensitive to antibiotics. These bacteria are in a state called persistence and each bacterium can…
In a double-well potential, a Bose-Einstein condensate exhibits Josephson oscillations or self-trapping, depending on its initial preparation and on the ratio of inter-particle interaction to inter-well tunneling. Here, we elucidate the…
This article presents a physical biology approach to understanding organization and segregation of bacterial chromosomes. The author uses a "piston" analogy for bacterial chromosomes in a cell, which leads to a phase diagram for the…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…