Related papers: Evolutionary stability of antigenically escaping v…
The propagation of infectious diseases and its impact on individuals play a major role in disease dynamics, and it is important to incorporate population heterogeneity into efforts to study diseases. As a simplistic but illustrative…
Human behaviour strongly influences the spread of infectious diseases: understanding the interplay between epidemic dynamics and adaptive behaviours is essential to improve response strategies to epidemics, with the goal of containing the…
Complex networks have established themselves along the last years as being particularly suitable and flexible for representing and modeling several complex natural and human-made systems. At the same time in which the structural intricacies…
We use traveling-wave theory to derive expressions for the rate of accumulation of deleterious mutations under Muller's ratchet and the speed of adaptation under positive selection in asexual populations. Traveling-wave theory is a…
Tumor-immune interactions are shaped by both antigenic heterogeneity and stochastic perturbations in the tumor microenvironment, yet the mathematical mechanisms underlying immune phase transitions remain poorly understood. We propose a…
A possible explanation based on first principles for the appearance of the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is proposed involving coinfection with HIV. The gist is that the resultant HIV-induced immunocompromise allows SARS-CoV-2…
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the mechanism for the interplay of deterministic and stochastic models for contagious diseases. Deterministic models for contagious diseases are prone to predict global stability. Small natural birth…
Mutational escape from vaccine induced immune responses has thwarted the development of a successful vaccine against AIDS, whose causative agent is HIV, a highly mutable virus. Knowing the virus' fitness as a function of its proteomic…
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…
Influenza virus contains two highly variable envelope glycoproteins, hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA). The structure and properties of HA, which is responsible for binding the virus to the cell that is being infected, change…
We investigate the evolution of quiescence within the framework of Adaptive Dynamics for an SIQS (Susceptible - Infected - Quiescent) model with constant environment. In the first part of the paper, the competition of two strains which have…
Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
Multiple viruses are widely studied because of their negative effect on the health of host as well as on whole population. The dynamics of coinfection is important in this case. We formulated a SIR model that describes the coinfection of…
Eukaryotic cells demonstrate a wide variety of dynamic patterns of filamentous actin (F-actin) and its regulators. Some of these patterns play important roles in cell functions, such as distinct motility modes, which motivate this study. We…
Human pathogens transmitted through environmental pathways are subject to stress and pressures outside of the host. These pressures may cause pathogen pathovars to diverge in their environmental persistence and their infectivity on an…
Is evolution always gradual or can it make leaps? We examine a mathematical model of an evolutionary process on a fitness landscape and obtain analytic solutions for the probability of multi-mutation leaps, that is, several mutations…
Viral zoonoses have emerged as the key drivers of recent pandemics. Human infection by zoonotic viruses are either spillover events -- isolated infections that fail to cause a widespread contagion -- or species jumps, where successful…
The drift-barrier hypothesis states that random genetic drift constrains the refinement of a phenotype under natural selection. The influence of effective population size and the genome-wide deleterious mutation rate were studied…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…