Related papers: A contact process with stronger mutations on trees
Between pandemics, the influenza virus exhibits periods of incremental evolution via a process known as antigenic drift. This process gives rise to a sequence of strains of the pathogen that are continuously replaced by newer strains,…
We model the immune surveillance of a pathogen which passes through $n$ immunologically distinct stages. The biological parameters of this system induce a partial order on the stages, and this, in turn, determines which stages will be…
The spread of infectious disease and the evolution of antigenically distinct strains are often modeled separately, despite strong feedbacks mediated by host immune memory and heterogeneous contacts. To tackle this challenging problem, we…
The ordinary contact process is used to model the spread of a disease in a population. In this model, each infected individual waits an exponentially distributed time with parameter 1 before becoming healthy. In this paper, we introduce and…
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…
A host-parasite model is considered for a population of cells that can be of two types, A or B, and exhibits unilateral reproduction: while a B-cell always splits into two cells of the same type, the two daughter cells of an A-cell can be…
The stacked contact process is a stochastic model for the spread of an infection within a population of hosts located on the $d$-dimensional integer lattice. Regardless of whether they are healthy or infected, hosts give birth and die at…
Biological organisms have evolved a wide range of immune mechanisms to defend themselves against pathogens. Beyond molecular details, these mechanisms differ in how protection is acquired, processed and passed on to subsequent generations…
As pathogens spread in a population of hosts, immunity is built up and the pool of susceptible individuals is depleted. This generates selective pressure, to which many human RNA viruses, such as influenza virus or SARS-CoV-2, respond with…
Mechanisms of immunity, and of the host-pathogen interactions in general are among the most fundamental problems of medicine, ecology, and evolution studies. Here, we present a microscopic, protein-level, sequence-based model of immune…
We investigate the dynamics of a simple epidemiological model for the invasion by a pathogen strain of a population where another strain circulates. We assume that reinfection by the same strain is possible but occurs at a reduced rate due…
We consider a discrete-time host-parasite model for a population of cells which are colonized by proliferating parasites. The cell population grows like an ordinary Galton-Watson process, but in reflection of real biological settings the…
Many pathogens spread primarily via direct contact between infected and susceptible hosts. Thus, the patterns of contacts or contact network of a population fundamentally shapes the course of epidemics. While there is a robust and growing…
We study inhomogeneous host-pathogen dynamics to model the global amphibian population extinction in a lake basin system. The lake basin system is modeled as quenched disorder. In this model we show that once the pathogen arrives at the…
We present a stochastic approach to modeling the dynamics of coexistence of prey and predator populations. It is assumed that the space of coexistence is explicitly subdivided in a grid of cells. Each cell can be occupied by only one…
A tumor can be thought of as an ecosystem, which critically means that we cannot just consider it as a collection of mutated cells but more as a complex system of many interacting cellular and microenvironmental elements. At its simplest, a…
The adaptive and innate branches of the vertebrate immune system work in close collaboration to protect organisms from harmful pathogens. As an organism ages its immune system undergoes immunosenescence, characterized by declined…
Chronic viral infections can persist in an infected person for decades. From the perspective of the virus, a single infection can span thousands of generations, leading to a highly diverse population of viruses with its own complex…
Cooperation and competition between pathogens can alter the amount of individuals affected by a co-infection. Nonetheless, the evolution of the pathogens' behavior has been overlooked. Here, we consider a co-evolutionary model where the…
Stochastic modeling of disease dynamics has had a long tradition. Among the first epidemic models including a spatial structure in the form of local interactions is the contact process. In this article we investigate two extensions of the…