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Many complex diseases are known to be affected by the interactions between genetic variants and environmental exposures beyond the main genetic and environmental effects. Study of gene-environment (G$\times$E) interactions is important for…
Background In a study performed on multiplex Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Sardinian families to identify disease causing plasma proteins, application of Mendelian Randomization (MR) methods encounters difficulties due to relatedness of…
Entomophthoralean fungi are insect pathogenic fungi and are characterized by their active discharge of infective conidia that infect insects. Our aim was to study the effects of temperature on the discharge and to characterize the variation…
This work explores the application of various supervised classification approaches using prosodic information for the identification of spoken North S\'ami language varieties. Dialects are language varieties that enclose characteristics…
The intrinsic stochasticity of gene expression can lead to large variability of protein levels across a population of cells. Variability (or noise) in protein distributions can be modulated by cellular mechanisms of gene regulation; in…
D. discoideum has been recently suggested as an example of bet-hedging. Upon starvation a population of unicellular amoebae splits between aggregators, which form a fruiting body made of a stalk and resistant spores, and non-aggregators.…
Infectious disease dynamics operate across multiple biological scales, with within-host viral dynamics being a key driver of between-host transmission. However, while models that explicitly link these scales exist, none have been developed…
How adaptive evolution to one environmental stress improves or suppresses adaptation to another is an important problem in evolutionary biology. For instance, in microbiology, the evolution of bacteria to be resistant to different…
We study by simulation the effect of the diffusive motion of repressor molecules on the noise in mRNA and protein levels in the case of a repressed gene. We find that spatial fluctuations due to diffusion can drastically enhance the noise…
Motivated by genetic fine-mapping applications, we introduce a new approach to Bayesian variable selection regression (BVSR) for time-to-event (TTE) outcomes. This new approach is designed to deal with the specific challenges that arise in…
The study of common heritability, or co-heritability, among multiple traits has been widely established in quantitative and molecular genetics. However, in bacteria, genome-based estimation of heritability has only been considered very…
Cells are known to utilize biochemical noise to probabilistically switch between distinct gene expression states. We demonstrate that such noise-driven switching is dominated by tails of probability distributions and is therefore…
Transcription of genes is the focus of most forms of regulation of gene expression. Even though careful biochemical experimentation has revealed the molecular mechanisms of transcription initiation for a number of different promoters in…
We consider the dynamics of a virus spreading through a population that produces a mutant strain with the ability to infect individuals that were infected with the established strain. Temporary cross-immunity is included using a time delay,…
To investigate interactions between parasite species in a host, a population of field voles was studied longitudinally, with presence or absence of six different parasites measured repeatedly. Although trapping sessions were regular, a…
Identifying viral pathogens and characterizing their transmission is essential to developing effective public health measures in response to a pandemic. Phylogenetics, though currently the most popular tool used to characterize the likely…
Human behavior is a dynamic process that evolves with experience. Understanding the evolution of individual's risk propensity is critical to design public health interventions to propitiate the adoption of better biosecurity protocols and…
We investigate how key epidemiological parameters shape both seasonal epidemics and the persistence of dengue transmission. Our findings confirm known mechanistic drivers of epidemic variability and introduce a ranking of parameter…
Molecular phenotyping by gene expression profiling is common in contemporary cancer research and in molecular diagnostics. However, molecular profiling remains costly and resource intense to implement, and is just starting to be introduced…
A number of studies have indicated a potential association between prenatal exposure to radiation and late mental disabilities. This is believed to be due to long-term developmental changes and functional impairment of the central nervous…