种群与进化
African Swine Fever (ASF) represents the main threat to swine production, with heavy economic consequences for both farmers and the food industry. The spread of the virus that causes ASF through Europe raises the issues of identifying…
Let $T$ be an arbitrary phylogenetic tree with $n$ leaves. It is well-known that the average quartet distance between two assignments of taxa to the leaves of $T$ is $\frac 23 \binom{n}{4}$. However, a longstanding conjecture of Bandelt and…
The standard approach to estimate species trees is to align a selected set of genes, concatenate the alignments and then estimate a consensus tree. However, individual genes contain differing levels of evolutionary information, either…
Vaccines are the most powerful pharmaceutical tool to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. While the majority (about 65%) of the German population were fully vaccinated, incidence started growing exponentially in October 2021 with about 41% of…
Mutation and drift play opposite roles in genetics. While mutation creates diversity, drift can cause gene variants to disappear, especially when they are rare. In the absence of natural selection and migration, the balance between the…
The robustness of an ecological network quantifies the resilience of the ecosystem it represents to species loss. It corresponds to the proportion of species that are disconnected from the rest of the network when extinctions occur…
This work deals with the influence of the neighborhood in simple rock-paper-scissors models of biodiversity. We consider the case of three distinct species which evolve under the standard rules of mobility, reproduction and competition. The…
Background: Recent work showed that the temporal growth of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) follows a sub-exponential power-law scaling whenever effective control interventions are in place. Taking this into consideration, we…
Suppose we have $n$ different types of self-replicating entity, with the population $P_i$ of the $i$th type changing at a rate equal to $P_i$ times the fitness $f_i$ of that type. Suppose the fitness $f_i$ is any continuous function of all…
The search for more realistic models for interacting species has produced many adaptations of the original Lotka-Volterra equations, such as the inclusion of the Allee effect and the different Holling's types of functional response. In the…
Although traditional models of epidemic spreading focus on the number of infected, susceptible and recovered individuals, a lot of attention has been devoted to integrate epidemic models with population genetics. Here we develop an…
The Gaia hypothesis considers the life-environment coupled system as a single entity that acts to regulate and maintain habitable conditions on Earth. In this paper we discuss three mechanisms which could potentially lead to Gaia: Selection…
Sensitivity Analysis (SA) is a useful tool to measure the impact of changes in model parameters on the infection dynamics, particularly to quantify the expected efficacy of disease control strategies. SA has only been applied to epidemic…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
Deterministic compartmental models have been used extensively in modeling epidemic propagation. These models are required to fit available data and numerical procedures are often implemented to this end. But not every model architecture is…
A key question in evolution is how likely a mutant is to take over. This depends on natural selection and on stochastic fluctuations. Population spatial structure can impact mutant fixation probabilities. We introduce a model for structured…
Contact Tracing (CT) is one of the measures taken by government and health officials to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus. In this paper, we investigate its efficacy by developing a compartmental model for assessing its impact on…
First Few X (FFX) studies collect household-stratified data in the early stages of a pandemic, in order to infer severity and transmissibility of an emerging disease. We present a Bayesian method to approximately infer population-level…
Viral outbreaks, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, are commonly described by compartmental models by means of ordinary differential equation (ODE) systems. The parameter values of these ODE models are typically unknown and need to be…
As of December 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has infected over 75 million people, making it the deadliest pandemic in modern history. This study develops a novel compartmental epidemiological model specific to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and…