Related papers: Optimal strategies for fighting persistent bugs
Combining a spatiotemporal, multi-agent based model of a foraging ecosystem with linear, genetically programmed rules for the agents' behaviors results in implicit, endogenous, objective functions and selection algorithms based on "natural…
Antimicrobial resistance to drugs (AMR), a global threat to human and animal health, is often regarded as resulting from cooperative behaviour. Moreover, microbes generally evolve in volatile environments that, together with demographic…
A hallmark of bacterial populations cultured in vitro is their homogeneity of growth, where the majority of cells display identical growth rate, cell size and content. Recent insights, however, have revealed that even cells growing in…
Risk spreading in bacterial populations is generally regarded as a strategy to maximize survival. Here, we study its role during range expansion of a genetically diverse population where growth and motility are two alternative traits. We…
Motile bacteria are known to accumulate at surfaces, eventually leading to changes in bacterial motility and bio-film formation. We use a novel two-colour, three-dimensional Lagrangian tracking technique, to follow simultaneously the body…
Bacteria live in environments that are continuously fluctuating and changing. Exploiting any predictability of such fluctuations can lead to an increased fitness. On longer timescales bacteria can "learn" the structure of these fluctuations…
Why, contrary to theoretical predictions, do marine microbe communities harbor tremendous phenotypic heterogeneity? How can so many marine microbe species competing in the same niche coexist? We discovered a unifying explanation for both…
Antibiotic resistance presents a growing global health threat by diminishing the effectiveness of treatments and allowing once-manageable bacterial infections to persist. This study develops and analyzes an optimization-based mathematical…
Many types of bacteria can survive under stress by switching stochastically between two different phenotypes: the "normals" who multiply fast, but are vulnerable to stress, and the "persisters" who hardly multiply, but are resilient to…
The transition from localized to systemic spreading of bacteria, viruses and other agents is a fundamental problem that spans medicine, ecology, biology and agriculture science. We have conducted experiments and simulations in a simple…
Mathematical modelling of epidemiological and coevolutionary dynamics is widely being used to improve disease management strategies of infectious diseases. Many diseases present some form of intra-host quiescent stage, also known as covert…
Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a widely used nature-inspired meta-heuristic for solving continuous optimization problems. However, when running the PSO algorithm, one encounters the phenomenon of so-called stagnation, that means in…
Mitigation measures are essential for controlling the spread of infectious diseases during pandemics and epidemics, but they impose considerable societal, individual, and economic costs. We developed a general optimization framework to…
Dormancy is a widespread adaptive strategy that enables populations to persist in fluctuating environments, yet how its benefits depend on the temporal structure of environmental variability remains unclear. We examine how dormancy…
We propose a mathematical model of Antimicrobial Resistance in the host to predict the failure of two antagonists of bacterial growth: the immune response and a single-antibiotic therapy. After characterising the initial bacterial load that…
In this work, two mathematical models for malaria under resistance are presented. More precisely, the first model shows the interaction between humans and mosquitoes inside a patch under infection of malaria when the human population is…
Antibiotic resistance, which is a serious healthcare issue, emerges due to uncontrolled and repeated antibiotic use that causes bacteria to mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics. The Antibiotics Time Machine Problem aims to come up…
Diseases caused by bacteria have been a threat to human civilisation for centuries. Despite the availability of numerous antibacterial drugs today, bacterial diseases continue to pose life-threatening challenges. The credit for this goes to…
This article considers the minimization of the total number of infected individuals over the course of an epidemic in which the rate of infectious contacts can be reduced by time-dependent nonpharmaceutical interventions. The societal and…
We propose and analyze a model for antibiotic resistance transfer in a bacterial biofilm and examine antibiotic dosing strategies that are effective in bacterial elimination. In particular, we consider a 1-D model of a biofilm with…