NLM IRP Seminar Schedule
UPCOMING SEMINARS
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May 21, 2024 Ziynet Kesimoglu
Multiomics Data Integration using Graph Convolutional Networks -
May 23, 2024 Leslie Ronish
Identification of fold-switching proteins by FLIM-FRET -
May 28, 2024 Harutyun Saakyan
TBD -
May 30, 2024 Deepak Gupta
TBD
RECENT SEMINARS
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May 14, 2024 Stanley Liang
Knowledge-driven Latent Diffusion For COVID-19 Pneumonia Radiology Pattern Synthesis -
May 9, 2024 Pascal Mutz
The Riboviria protein structurome expands virus protein annotation and highlights protein relations -
April 30, 2024 Wenya Rowe
The conformal central charge of the spin-1/2 XX model derived from long-chain asymptotics -
April 25, 2024 Ermin Hodzic
Condition-Aware Cell Type Deconvolution of Bulk Tissues -
April 16, 2024 Jaya Srivastava
Regulatory plasticity of the human genome
Scheduled Seminars on Nov. 10, 2022
Contact NLM_IRP_Seminar_Scheduling@mail.nih.gov with questions about this seminar.
Abstract:
Background: Symbiotic relationships are ubiquitous in the biosphere. Inter-species symbiosis is impacted by intra-specific distinctions, in particular, those defined by the age structure of a population. Older individuals compete with younger individuals for resources despite being less likely to reproduce, diminishing the fitness of the population. Conversely, however, older individuals can support the reproduction of younger individuals, increasing the population fitness. Parasitic relationships are commonly age structured, typically, more adversely affecting older hosts.
Results: We employ mathematical modeling to explore the differential effects of collaborative or competitive host age structures on host-parasite relationships. A classical epidemiological compartment model is constructed with three disease states: susceptible, infected, and recovered. Each of these three states is partitioned into two compartments representing young, potentially reproductive, and old, post-reproductive, hosts, yielding 6 compartments in total. In order to describe competition and collaboration between old and young compartments, we model the reproductive success to depend on the fraction of young individuals in the population. Collaborative populations with relatively greater numbers of post-reproductive hosts enjoy greater reproductive success whereas in purely competitive populations, increasing the post-reproductive subpopulation reduces reproductive success. However, in competitive populations, virulent pathogens preferentially targeting old individuals can increase the population fitness.
Conclusions: We demonstrate that, in collaborative host populations, pathogens strictly impacting older, post-reproductive individuals can reduce population fitness even more than pathogens that directly impact younger, potentially reproductive individuals. In purely competitive populations, the reverse is observed, and we demonstrate that endemic, virulent pathogens can oxymoronically form a mutualistic relationship with the host, increasing the fitness of the host population. Applications to endangered species conservation and invasive species containment are discussed.