Related papers: A Selective Advantage for Conservative Viruses
Survival analysis concerns the task of predicting the time until an event occurs. Often used in the medical field, survival analysis deals with incomplete (i.e., censored) data, for instance, from patients who did not experience the event…
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally similar…
The evolution of many microbes and pathogens, including circulating viruses such as seasonal influenza, is driven by immune pressure from the host population. In turn, the immune systems of infected populations get updated, chasing viruses…
The design of protocols to suppress the propagation of viral infections is an enduring enterprise, especially hindered by limited knowledge of the mechanisms through which extinction of infection propagation comes about. We here report on a…
Antibodies, an essential part of our immune system, develop through an intricate process to bind a wide array of pathogens. This process involves randomly mutating DNA sequences encoding these antibodies to find variants with improved…
Ecology and evolution under changing environments are important in many subfields of biology with implications for medicine. Here, we explore an example: the consequences of fluctuating environments on the emergence of antibiotic…
Previous evolutionary studies demonstrated how evaluating evolving agents in variable environmental conditions enable them to develop solutions that are robust to environmental variation. We demonstrate how the robustness of the agents can…
We explore the commonalities between methods for assuring the security of computer systems (cybersecurity) and the mechanisms that have evolved through natural selection to protect vertebrates against pathogens, and how insights derived…
We consider the class of SIS epidemic models in which a large population of individuals chooses whether to adopt protection or to remain unprotected as the epidemic evolves. For a susceptible individual, adopting protection reduces the…
In an attempt to explain the uniqueness of the coding mechanism of living cells as contrasted with multi-species structure of ecosystems we examine two models of individuals with some replicative properties. In the first model the system…
Antigenic escape constitutes the main mechanism allowing rapidly evolving viruses to achieve endemicity. Beyond granting immune escape, empirical evidence also suggests that mutations of viruses might increase their inter-host…
We study a bi-virus susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemic model in which individuals are either susceptible or infected with one of two virus strains, and consider mutation-driven transitions between strains. The general case of…
Complex adaptive systems have been the subject of much recent attention. It is by now well-established that members (`agents') tend to self-segregate into opposing groups characterized by extreme behavior. However, while different social…
The evolutionary dynamics of HIV during the chronic phase of infection is driven by the host immune response and by selective pressures exerted through drug treatment. To understand and model the evolution of HIV quantitatively, the…
In binary classification applications, conservative decision-making that allows for abstention can be advantageous. To this end, we introduce a novel approach that determines the optimal cutoff interval for risk scores, which can be…
We propose a physical theory underlying the temporal evolution of competing virus variants that relies on the existence of (quasi) fixed points capturing the large time scale invariance of the dynamics. To motivate our result we first…
We consider a stochastic model for a pathogen population in the presence of an immune response, in which pathogen types are partially ordered by ancestry and the immune system must eliminate ancestor types before it can eliminate their…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
Background. In a number of recent experiments with food-and-mouth disease virus, a deleterious mutant, was found to avoid extinction and remain in the population for long periods of time. This observation was called quasispecies memory. The…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…