Related papers: How host mobility patterns shape antigenic escape …
Motile organisms can form stable agglomerates such as cities or colonies. In the outbreak of a highly contagious disease, the control of large-scale epidemic spread depends on factors like the number and size of agglomerates, travel rate…
Common respiratory viruses cause seasonal epidemics in sequential patterns. The underlying mechanisms for this pattern have been debated for some time. For influenza, contenders include temperature, humidity, and vitamin D levels. While…
Mathematical models of infectious disease transmission typically neglect within-host dynamics. Yet within-host dynamics - including pathogen replication, host immune responses, and interactions with microbiota - are crucial not only for…
Vector-borne diseases often infect multiple host species, increasing the likelihood of disease persistence due to the presence of multiple reservoirs. Vector biting patterns and feeding preferences can shift in response to selective…
Pathogens can spread epidemically through populations. Beneficial contagions, such as viruses that enhance host survival or technological innovations that improve quality of life, also have the potential to spread epidemically. How do the…
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…
From footpaths to flight routes, human mobility networks facilitate the spread of communicable diseases. Control and elimination efforts depend on characterizing these networks in terms of connections and flux rates of individuals between…
In an increasingly interconnected world, a key scientific challenge is to examine mechanisms that lead to the widespread propagation of contagions, such as misinformation and pathogens, and identify risk factors that can trigger large-scale…
In the first part of this paper, we review old and new results about the influence of host population heterogeneity on (various characteristics of) epidemic outbreaks. In the second part we highlight a modelling issue that so far has…
Bacteria evolve in volatile environments and complex spatial structures. Migration, fluctuations and environmental variability therefore have a significant impact on the evolution of microbial populations. Here, we consider a class of…
We review recent progress made in analyzing the spread of viruses and bugs in the internet. We describe how the use of a model that takes into account the complex inhomogeneity of the internet and its self organizing characteristics can…
Migration is a key mechanism for expansion of communities. In spatially heterogeneous environments, rapidly gaining knowledge about the local environment is key to the evolutionary success of a migrating population. For historical human…
Mobility data at EU scale can help understand the dynamics of the pandemic and possibly limit the impact of future waves. Still, since a reliable and consistent method to measure the evolution of contagion at international level is missing,…
Vector-borne diseases arise from the coupled dynamics of human mobility and mosquito ecology, producing outbreaks shaped by both spatial distributions and temporal patterns of movement. Here we develop a coarse-grained hub--leaf reduction…
The evolution of antimicrobial resistance generally occurs in an environment where antimicrobial concentration is variable, which has dramatic consequences on the microorganisms' fitness landscape, and thus on the evolution of resistance.…
Certain defense mechanisms of phages against the immune system of their bacterial host rely on cooperation of phages. Motivated by this example we analyse invasion probabilities of cooperative parasites in host populations that are…
We consider a spatial stochastic model for a pathogen population growing inside a host that attempts to eliminate the pathogens through its immune system. The pathogen population is divided into different types. A pathogen can either…
The dynamic spatial redistribution of individuals is a key driving force of various spatiotemporal phenomena on geographical scales. It can synchronise populations of interacting species, stabilise them, and diversify gene pools [1-3].…
We investigate the effects of cooperativity between contagion processes that spread and persist in a host population. We propose and analyze a dynamical model in which individuals that are affected by one transmissible agent $A$ exhibit a…
Competition within the immune system may degrade immune control of viral infections. We formalize the evolution that occurs in both HIV-1 and the immune system quasispecies. Inclusion of competition in the immune system leads to a novel…