To prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2, many countries adopted strict non-pharmacological interventions such as non-essential businesses or complete lockdowns. All these measures seem to be of little effectiveness. This is unlike its predecessors, SARS – CoV and MERS-CoV, that affected limited populations and disappeared shortly after they had emerged. High virulence of these viruses, severity of...
After the initial outbreak in China, the spread of infectious disease caused by novel coronavirus has rapidly transformed to a global pandemic. The rapid speed of modern DNA sequencing technology has enabled the quick determination of COVID-19 genetic sequence, which has triggered multiple efforts worldwide for the development of a vaccine against the novel coronavirus.
During the talk, I...
Here I will review my recent works [1] on modeling interacting contagious dynamics, for example coupled SIR or SIS dynamics, in mean field approximations and also on different random generated or empirical complex networks. I show and discuss how our recent results have been improving our understanding and prediction of epidemic dynamics and disease ecology while raising new questions and...
The basic reproduction number $R_0$ of the coronavirus disease 2019 has been often estimated to range between 2 and 4. We used a SEIR model that properly accounts for the distribution of the latent period and, based on empirical estimates of the doubling time in the near-exponential phases of epidemic progression in China, Italy, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, and New...
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has had severe consequences on nations worldwide. With about 26 million cases and nearly 1 million deaths to date (05.09.2020). It has imposed so many costs to the local, regional and global markets including hundreds of billions to the global insurance industry, tourism and other businesses. It has been considered as one of the costliest disasters after WWII....
Polarisation is one of the most basic levels of cell and tissue organisation. In developing epithelial tissues, planar polarisation is vital for coordinated cell behaviours during morphogenesis. Alongside experimental approaches, mathematical modelling offers a useful tool with which to unravel the underlying mechanisms. I will describe our recent efforts to model the planar polarised...
Spinal cord formation is achieved through dynamic changes of the cellular and tissue properties over time. In amniotes, its formation starts from a flat epithelial sheet which extends and folds at the embryo midline to form a closed neural tube. This morphogenetic transition involves changes in the epithelial organization as well as in the rates of cell proliferation and differentiation....
Tissue development and homeostasis rely on cellular decision-making in response to fluctuating environmental signals. The process of cellular decision-making integrates dynamics on different spatial scales ranging from the molecular to the tissue scale, where all spatial scales are subject to fluctuations and consume chemical energy to fuel interactions. How are information and fluctuations...
During the mammalian preimplantation phase, cells undergo two subsequent cell fate decisions. Within the second decision, the inner cell mass (ICM) segregates into the epiblast and the primitive endoderm. Recently, ICM organoids have been published as an in vitro model system towards preimplantational development. ICM organoids mimic the cell fate decision taking place in the in vivo mouse...
Understanding to what extent stem cell potential is a cell-intrinsic property or an emergent behavior coming from global tissue dynamics and geometry is a key outstanding question of systems and stem cell biology. Here, we propose a theory of stem cell dynamics as a stochastic competition for access to a spatially localized niche, giving rise to a stochastic conveyor-belt model. Cell divisions...
Reproductive cooperation represents one of the most surprising behaviours. Individuals forego their reproductive output (partially or entirely) and instead cooperate with other members of their social group in raising their offspring. Theoretical basis of reproductive cooperation in kin groups was laid out in the form of kin-selection theory. However, we still have little knowledge of the...
Biological systems not only have the remarkable capacity to build and maintain complex spatio-temporal structures in noisy environments, they can also rapidly break up and rebuild such structures. How such systems can simultaneously achieve both robust specialisation and plasticity is poorly understood. Here we use primitive societies of Polistes wasps as a model system where we experimentally...
Given one conception of biological individuality (evolutionary, physiological, etc.), can a holobiont – that is the host + its symbiotic (mutualistic, commensalist and parasitic) microbiome – be simultaneously a biological individual and an ecological community? Herein, we support this possibility by arguing that the notion of biological individuality is part‐dependent. In our account, the...
This paper deals with mathematical modeling and analysis of a predator-prey interaction model with fear-induced anti-predator defense. The main goal of this non-linear study is to investigate the drivers that are responsible for pattern formation in the predator-prey system. To my knowledge, this study is the first systematic study showing the simultaneous effects of fear and group defense...
Epidemic is a complicated process which spreads onto a complex not fully known topology. It affects not only properties of the population itself but also the network on which it spreads. The effective control measure should stop the epidemic at the lowest possible costs, therefore the problem of disease eradication cannot be separated from the economic layer, which includes, among others,...
Living organisms have been traditionally classified into two main categories: unicellular and multicellular. However, the boundary between these two groups are less strict and clear than was previously presumed. Studies on the unicellular communities have revealed that various properties, processes and behaviour so far mainly associated with metazoa are also important for the development and...
