种群与进化
The COVID-19 pandemic has had worldwide devastating effects on human lives, highlighting the need for tools to predict its development. Dynamics of such public-health threats can often be efficiently analysed through simple models that help…
OBJECTIVES: to describe the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on undetected cases and to evaluate different post-lockdown scenarios. DESIGN: the study introduces a SEIR compartmental model, taking into account the…
When faced with an imminent risk of predation, many animals react to escape consumption. Antipredator strategies are performed by individuals acting as a group to intimidate predators and minimize the damage when attacked. We study the…
Affinity Maturation (AM) is the process through which the immune system is able to develop potent antibodies against new pathogens it encounters, and is at the base of the efficacy of vaccines. At its core AM is analogous to a Darwinian…
Mathematical disease modelling has long operated under the assumption that any one infectious disease is caused by one transmissible pathogen spreading among a population. This paradigm has been useful in simplifying the biological reality…
We are interested in describing the infected size of the SIS Epidemic model using Birth-Death Markov process. The Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model is defined within a population of constant size $M$; the size is kept constant by…
This paper describes a mathematical model for the spread of a virus through an isolated population of a given size. The model uses three, color-coded components, called molecules (red for infected and still contagious; green for infected,…
Social insect colonies routinely face large vertebrate predators, against which they need to mount a collective defense. To do so, honeybees use an alarm pheromone that recruits nearby bees into mass stinging of the perceived threat. This…
Few African countries have reported COVID-19 case numbers above $1\,000$ as of April 18, 2020, with South Africa reporting $3\,034$ cases being hit hardest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Several African countries, especially South Africa, have…
Objectives: We aim to assess the impact of temperature and relative humidity on the transmission of COVID-19 across communities after accounting for community-level factors such as demographics, socioeconomic status, and human mobility…
Pavelka et al. (Science, Reports, 7 May 2021) claim that a single round of population-wide antigen testing in Slovakia reduced the observed COVID-19 prevalence by 58%, and that it played a substantial role in curbing the pandemic. We argue…
Rooted phylogenetic networks provide a way to describe species' relationships when evolution departs from the simple model of a tree. However, networks inferred from genomic data can be highly tangled, making it difficult to discern the…
Social distancing remains an important strategy to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. However, the impacts of specific state-level policies on mobility and subsequent COVID-19 case trajectories have not been completely…
Observed bimodal tree cover distributions at particular environmental conditions and theoretical models indicate that some areas in the tropics can be in either of the alternative stable vegetation states forest or savanna. However, when…
RNA viruses comprise vast populations of closely related, but highly genetically diverse, entities known as quasispecies. Understanding the mechanisms by which this extreme diversity is generated and maintained is fundamental when…
Phylogenetic comparative analysis is an approach to inferring evolutionary process from a combination of phylogenetic and phenotypic data. The last few years have seen increasingly sophisticated models employed in the evaluation of more and…
At odds with a traditional view of molecular evolution that seeks a descent-with-modification relationship between functional sequences, new functions can emerge {\it de novo} with relative ease. At early times of molecular evolution,…
There are often multiple diseases with cross immunity competing for vaccination resources. Here we investigate the optimal vaccination program in a two-layer Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model, where two diseases with cross immunity…
A well-known characteristic of pandemics such as COVID-19 is the high level of transmission heterogeneity in the infection spread: not all infected individuals spread the disease at the same rate and some individuals (superspreaders) are…
The severe acute respiratory syndrome COVID-19 has been in the center of the ongoing global health crisis in 2020. The high prevalence of mild cases facilitates sub-notification outside hospital environments and the number of those who are…