Related papers: Viral Evolution Under Physical Constraints: Decay,…
One of the most promising strategies to treat cancer is attacking it with viruses designed to exploit specific altered pathways. Here, the effects of oncolytic virotherapy on tumors having compact, papillary and disconnected morphologies…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
Susceptibility governs the dynamics of contagion. The classical SIR model is one of the simplest compartmental models of contagion spread, assuming a single shared susceptibility level. However, variation in susceptibility over a population…
We are concerned with the vulnerability of computer vision models to distributional shifts. We formulate a combinatorial optimization problem that allows evaluating the regions in the image space where a given model is more vulnerable, in…
A variety of genome transformations can occur as a microbial population adapts to a large environmental change. In particular, genomic surveys indicate that, following the transition to an obligate, host-dependent symbiont, the density of…
The spread of a particular trait in a cell population often is modelled by an appropriate system of ordinary differential equations describing how the sizes of subpopulations of the cells with the same genome change in time. On the other…
In this work we study how a viral capsid can change conformation using techniques of Large Deviations Theory for stochastic differential equations. The viral capsid is a model of a complex system in which many units - the proteins forming…
The adaptive immune system relies on the diversity of receptors expressed on the surface of B and T-cells to protect the organism from a vast amount of pathogenic threats. The proliferation and degradation dynamics of different cell types…
The interaction between natural selection and random mutation is frequently debated in recent years. Does similar dilemma also exist in the evolution of real networks such as biological networks? In this paper, we try to discuss this issue…
The dynamics of epidemic spreading is often reduced to the single control parameter $R_0$, whose value, above or below unity, determines the state of the contagion. If, however, the pathogen evolves as it spreads, $R_0$ may change over…
Defective interfering particles arise spontaneously during a viral infection as mutants lacking essential parts of the viral genome. Their ability to replicate in the presence of the wild-type (WT) virus (at the expense of viable viral…
The present article introduces a reference framework for discussing resilience of computational systems. Rather than a property that may or may not be exhibited by a system, resilience is interpreted here as the emerging result of a dynamic…
Natural Immune system plays a vital role in the survival of the all living being. It provides a mechanism to defend itself from external predates making it consistent systems, capable of adapting itself for survival incase of changes. The…
Mathematical models of the real world are simplified representations of complex systems. A caveat to using mathematical models is that predicted causal effects and conditional independences may not be robust under model extensions, limiting…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
One of the main properties of biological systems is modularity, which manifests itself at all levels of their organization, starting with the level of molecular genetics, ending with the level of whole organisms and their communities. In a…
A macroscopic theory for describing cellular states during steady-growth is presented, which is based on the consistency between cellular growth and molecular replication, as well as the robustness of phenotypes against perturbations.…
Biological systems exhibit two structural features on many levels of organization: sparseness, in which only a small fraction of possible interactions between components actually occur; and modularity - the near decomposability of the…
Invasion fronts in ecology are well studied but very few mathematical results concern the case with variable motility (possibly due to mutations). Based on an apparently simple reaction-diffusion equation, we explain the observed phenomena…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…