Related papers: Optimal strategies for fighting persistent bugs
Aging is analyzed as the spontaneous loss of adaptivity and increase in fragility that characterizes dynamic systems. Cybernetics defines the general regulatory mechanisms that a system can use to prevent or repair the damage produced by…
Human decision-making differs due to variation in both incentives and available information. This constitutes a substantial challenge for the evaluation of whether and how machine learning predictions can improve decision outcomes. We…
Biological control, the use of predators and pathogens to control target pests, is a promising alternative to chemical control. It is hypothesized that the introduced predators efficacy can be boosted by providing them with an additional…
Tuberculosis (TB) is the world's deadliest infectious disease, with over 1.5 million deaths annually and 10 million new cases reported each year. The causative organism, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) can take nearly 40 days to culture, a…
Antibiotic resistance constitutes a major health threat. Predicting bacterial causes of infections is key to reducing antibiotic misuse, a leading driver of antibiotic resistance. We train a machine learning algorithm on administrative and…
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…
Existing strategies for determining the optimal treatment or monitoring strategy typically assume unlimited access to resources. However, when a health system has resource constraints, such as limited funds, access to medication, or…
Complex biological systems are very robust to genetic and environmental changes at all levels of organization. Many biological functions of Escherichia coli metabolism can be sustained against single-gene or even multiple-gene mutations by…
Bacteriophage-bacteria interactions are central to microbial ecology, influencing evolution, biogeochemical cycles, and pathogen behavior. Most theoretical models assume static environments and passive bacterial hosts, neglecting the joint…
The skin microbiome plays an important role in the maintenance of a healthy skin. It is an ecosystem, composed of several species, competing for resources and interacting with the skin cells. Imbalance in the cutaneous microbiome, also…
Dispersal of species is a fundamental ecological process in the evolution and maintenance of biodiversity. Limited control over ecological parameters has hindered progress in understanding of what enables species to colonise new area, as…
The factors contributing to the persistence and stability of life are fundamental for understanding complex living systems. Organisms are commonly challenged by harsh and fluctuating environments that are suboptimal for growth and…
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) threatens global health. A promising and underexplored strategy to tackle this problem is sequential therapies exploiting collateral sensitivity (CS), whereby resistance to one drug increases sensitivity to…
Organisms that grow and survive in uncertain environments may need to change their physiological state as the environment changes. When the environment is uncertain, one strategy known as bet-hedging is to make these changes randomly and…
Many studies have been performed to characterize the dynamics and stability of the microbiome across a range of environmental contexts [Costello et al., 2012, Faust et al., 2015]. For example, it is often of interest to identify time…
Robust systems, like the molecular networks of living cells are often resistant to single hits such as those caused by high-specificity drugs. Here we show that partial weakening of the Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae…
The bacterium E. coli maneuvers itself to regions with high chemoattractant concentrations by performing two stereotypical moves: `runs', in which it moves in near straight lines, and `tumbles', in which it does not advance but changes…
In this paper we propose and study a spatial diffusion model for the control of anthracnose disease in a bounded domain. The model is a generalization of the one previously developed in [14]. We use the model to simulate two different types…
This paper addresses novel consensus problems in the presence of adversaries that can move within the network and induce faulty behaviors in the attacked agents. By adopting several mobile adversary models from the computer science…
Drug resistance is a serious public health problem that threatens to thwart our ability to treat many infectious diseases. Repeatedly, the introduction of new drugs has been followed by the evolution of resistance. In principle there are…