Related papers: Optimal strategies for fighting persistent bugs
Microbiomes are complex systems comprised of many interacting species. Species can survive harsh or changing conditions by rapid adaptation, a process accelerated by the exchange of genetic material between different species through…
Microbial communities routinely have several alternative stable states observed for the same environmental parameters. Sudden and irreversible transitions between these states make external manipulation of these systems more complicated. To…
Dormancy is an essential strategy for microorganisms to cope with environmental stress. However, global ecosystem models typically ignore microbial dormancy, resulting in major model uncertainties. To facilitate the consideration of…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
We apply optimal control theory to a tuberculosis model given by a system of ordinary differential equations. Optimal control strategies are proposed to minimize the cost of interventions, considering reinfection and post-exposure…
Antibiotic resistance is a major threat to global health. It emerges in multispecies microbial communities under antibiotic exposure. This makes antibiotic spectrum -- a drug's distribution of effects across species -- a potential key…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
We explore the emergence of persistent infection in a patch of population, where the disease progression of the individuals is given by the SIRS model and an individual becomes infected on contact with another infected individual. We…
Despite major environmental and genetic differences, microbial metabolic networks are known to generate consistent physiological outcomes across vastly different organisms. This remarkable robustness suggests that, at least in bacteria,…
In systems as diverse as migrating mammals to road traffic, crowding acts to inhibit efficient collective movement. Bacteria, however, are observed to move in very dense groups containing billions of individuals without causing the gridlock…
Understanding how antibiotics inhibit bacteria can help to reduce antibiotic use and hence avoid antimicrobial resistance - yet few theoretical models exist for bacterial growth inhibition by a clinically relevant antibiotic treatment…
Rapidly mutating pathogens may be able to persist in the population and reach an endemic equilibrium by escaping hosts' acquired immunity. For such diseases, multiple biological, environmental and population-level mechanisms determine the…
When microbes compete for limited resources, they often engage in chemical warfare using bacterial toxins. This competition can be understood in terms of evolutionary game theory (EGT). We study the predictions of EGT for the bacterial…
Bacterial growth environment strongly influences the efficacy of antibiotic treatment, with slow growth often being associated with decreased susceptibility. Yet in many cases the connection between antibiotic susceptibility and pathogen…
In combinatorial optimization, partial variable assignments are called persistent if they agree with some optimal solution. We propose persistency criteria for the multicut and max-cut problem as well as fast combinatorial routines to…
Multi-resistant organisms (MROs), the bacteria that are resistant to a number of different antibiotics, have been very popular around the world in recent years. They are very difficult to treat but highly infectious in humans. MRSA…
As antibiotic resistance continues to pose a significant threat to public health, alternative treatments are urgently needed. Phage therapy, which utilizes bacteriophages to specifically target bacterial pathogens, has emerged as a…
This paper investigates the deterministic extinction and permanence of a family of SEIRS malaria models with multiple random delays, and with a general nonlinear incidence rate. The conditions for the extinction and permanence of the…
Phages use bacterial host resources to replicate, intrinsically linking phage and host survival. To understand phage dynamics, it is essential to understand phage-host ecology. A key step in this ecology is infection of bacterial hosts.…
We introduce a new coordination problem in distributed computing that we call the population stability problem. A system of agents each with limited memory and communication, as well as the ability to replicate and self-destruct, is…