Progressive diseases: Interpretation of genetic data.
In this review paper we consider physiologically structured population models that have been widely studied and employed in the literature to model the dynamics of a wide variety of populations. However in a number of cases these have been found inadequate to describe some phenomena arising in certain real-world applications such as dispersion in the structure variables due to growth uncertainty/variability. Prompted by this, we described two recent...
Recently, data on multiple gene expression at sequential time points were analyzed using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) as a means to capture dominant trends, called characteristic modes, followed by the fitting of a linear discrete-time dynamical system in which the expression values at a given time point are linear combinations of the values at a previous time point. We attempt to address several aspects of the method. To obtain the model, we formulate a nonlinear optimization problem...
We present an extension of the protector control scheme introduced for the linear case in a previous work to a class of nonlinear systems. The systems considered are assumed to have a finite propagation velocity while the initial state is subject to a spreading disturbance. We characterize such a control first by using the remediability approach to the resulting nonlinear delay system, and then by coupling families of transformations and the delay approach. To illustrate this work, we provide a...
In this paper we present a method for evaluating the importance of GO terms which compose multi-attribute rules. The rules are generated for the purpose of biological interpretation of gene groups. Each multi-attribute rule is a combination of GO terms and, based on relationships among them, one can obtain a functional description of gene groups. We present a method which allows evaluating the influence of a given GO term on the quality of a rule and the quality of a whole set of rules. For each...
The emergence of multidrug resistance among gram-negative bacilli is complex. Numerous factors need to be considered, including the biological fitness cost of resistance, fitnesscompensatory mutations and frequency and type of antibiotic exposure. A mathematical model evaluating these complex relationships was developed in an individual colonized with strains of pan-susceptible, single-, two- and multidrug-resistant (MDR) gram-negative bacilli (GN). The effect of bacterial fitness, compensatory...
The aim of this study was to describe and analyze the regulation and spatio-temporal dynamics of melanocyte migration in vitro and its coupling to cell division and interaction with the matrix. The melanocyte lineage is particularly interesting because it is involved in both embryonic development and oncogenesis/metastasis (melanoma). Biological experiments were performed on two melanocyte cell lines established from wild-type and β-catenin-transgenic...