Related papers: Disease from opposing forces in regulatory control

A strategy is a plan, method, or series of actions for obtaining a specified goal. A military strategy typically employs the threat or use of military force in opposition to an adversary, and is called upon where large scale force is viewed…

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…

From fake news to innovative technologies, many contagions spread via a process of social reinforcement, where multiple exposures are distinct from prolonged exposure to a single source. Contrarily, biological agents such as Ebola or…

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…

We have investigated the role that the mutation rate and the structure of genetic variation at a locus play in determining whether a gene is involved in disease. We predict that the mutation rate and its genetic diversity should be higher…

Immune cells recognize and discriminate antigens through immunological synapses - dynamic intercellular junctions exhibiting highly organized receptor-ligand patterns. While much work has focused on molecular kinetics and passive mechanisms…

This paper is motivated by a class of positive systems with an input that is subject to an unknown state-dependent power law delay as well as saturation. For example, biological networks have non-negative protein concentration states. Mass…

Although the immune response is often regarded as acting to suppress tumor growth, it is now clear that it can be both stimulatory and inhibitory. The interplay between these competing influences has complex implications for tumor…

Aging is a fundamental aspect of living systems that undergo a progressive deterioration of physiological function with age and an increase of vulnerability to disease and death. Living systems, known as complex systems, require complexity…

We use fitness graphs, or directed cube graphs, for analyzing evolutionary reversibility. The main application is antimicrobial drug resistance. Reversible drug resistance has been observed both clinically and experimentally. If drug…

The structure of a society depends, to some extent, on the incentives of the individuals they are composed of. We study a stylized model of this interplay, that suggests that the more individuals aim at climbing the social hierarchy, the…

Hematopoiesis is a complex biological process that leads to the production and regulation of blood cells. It is based upon differentiation of stem cells under the action of growth factors. A mathematical approach of this process is proposed…

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…

I address here the question of the mutual interplay of strong correlations and disorder in the system. I consider random version of the Hubbard model. Diagonal randomness is introduced {\it via} random on-site energies and treated by the…

In diseases with long-term immunity, vaccination is known to increase the average age at infection as a result of the decrease in the pathogen circulation. This implies that a vaccination campaign can have negative effects when a disease is…

The problem of unicellular-multicellular transition is one of the main issues that is discussing in evolutionary biology. In [1] the fitness of a colony of cells is considered in terms of its two basic components, viability and fecundity.…

Functions or 'functionings' enable to give a structure to any activity and their combinations constitute the capabilities which characterize economic assets such as work utility. The basic law of supply and demand naturally emerges from…

Dissensus is a modeling framework for networks of dynamic agents in competition for scarce resources. Originally inspired by biological cells behaviors, it fits also marketing, finance and many other application areas. Competition is often…

The article constructs a game-theoretic model of preventive measures for the antagonistic game with nature, that is such a model in which two participants take part, one of which is a regulating body (government) that makes legislative…

It is widely appreciated that well-balanced excitation and inhibition are necessary for proper function in neural networks. However, in principle, such balance could be achieved by many possible configurations of excitatory and inhibitory…