Publications related to Heterogeneity in schistosomiasis transmission dynamics

Microfluidic systems for infectious disease diagnostics

Microorganisms, encompassing both uni- and multicellular entities, exhibit remarkable diversity as omnipresent life forms in nature. They play a pivotal role by supplying essential components for sustaining biological processes across diverse ecosystems, i ...

Royal Soc Chemistry2024

Single-cell analysis of the interactions between Mycobacterium tuberculosis and macrophages

Ophélie Rutschmann

Mycobacterium Tuberculosis is a highly effective pathogen infecting nearly a third of the world's population. An M. tuberculosis infection starts when droplets containing bacteria enter an individual's lungs. The first host cells to contact the bacteria ar ...

EPFL2024

Advancing first principle-based molecular dynamics of biological systems with machine learning

François Louis Mouvet

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have emerged as a transformative approach to analyse molecular systems at the atomic level, offering valuable insights into complex biological processes. Many biological phenomena can only accurately be described by inco ...

EPFL2023

Host-Pathogen Interactions Through the Genomic Lens

Zhi Ming Xu

Hosts and pathogens are involved in a long-standing evolutionary arms race characterized by successive rounds of evolution. Specifically, while hosts evolve resistance against infections, pathogens adapt to re-establish virulence. Since the signatures of t ...

EPFL2023

Stay close, but not too close: aerial image analysis reveals patterns of social distancing in seal colonies

Devis Tuia, Benjamin Alexander Kellenberger

Many species aggregate in dense colonies. Species-specific spatial patterns provide clues about how colonies are shaped by various (a)biotic factors, including predation, temperature regulation or disease transmission. Using aerial imagery, we examined the ...

2023

Predictive performance of multi-model ensemble forecasts of COVID-19 across European nations

Nicola Parolini, Ntorina Thanou, David Kraus, Andrea Kraus, Daniel Lopez, Markus Scholz, Benjamin Bejar Haro, Daniel Rodrigo Lopez, Ekaterina Krymova, Tao Sun

Background:Short-term forecasts of infectious disease burden can contribute to situational awareness and aid capacity planning. Based on best practice in other fields and recent insights in infectious disease epidemiology, one can maximise the predictive p ...

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD2023

Energy-harnessing problem solving of primordial life: Modeling the emergence of catalytic host-nested parasite life cycles

Christian Iseli

All life forms on earth ultimately descended from a primordial population dubbed the last universal common ancestor or LUCA via Darwinian evolution. Extant living systems share two salient functional features, a metabolism extracting and transforming energ ...

2023

Spatially explicit effective reproduction numbers from incidence and mobility data

Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo, Lorenzo Mari, Marino Gatto, Damiano Pasetto, Cristiano Trevisin

Current methods for near real-time estimation of effective reproduction numbers from surveillance data overlook mobility fluxes of infectors and susceptible individuals within a spatially connected network (the metapopulation). Exchanges of infections amon ...

2023

Novel High-Throughput Fluorescence-Based Assay for the Identification of Nematocidal Compounds That Target the Blood-Feeding Pathway

Gerardo Turcatti, Marc Chambon, Nicola Harris, Anthony Marchand, Tiffany Babette Angélique Bouchery, Mati André Marie Moyat

Hookworm infections cause a neglected tropical disease (NTD) affecting ~740 million people worldwide, principally those living in disadvantaged communities. Infections can cause high morbidity due to their impact on nutrient uptake and their need to feed o ...

2022

Epidemicity of cholera spread and the fate of infection control measures

Andrea Rinaldo, Lorenzo Mari, Joseph Chadi Benoit Lemaitre, Marino Gatto, Damiano Pasetto, Cristiano Trevisin

The fate of ongoing infectious disease outbreaks is predicted through reproduction numbers, defining the long-term establishment of the infection, and epidemicity indices, tackling the reactivity of the infectious pool to new contagions. Prognostic metrics ...

2022

A Phylogeny-aware GWAS Framework to Correct for Heritable Pathogen Effects on Infectious Disease Traits

Jacques Fellay, Christian Axel Wandall Thorball

Infectious diseases are particularly challenging for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) because genetic effects from two organisms (pathogen and host) can influence a trait. Traditional GWAS assume individual samples are independent observations. Howev ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2022

Preexisting Heterogeneity of Inducible Nitric Oxide Synthase Expression Drives Differential Growth of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Macrophages

John McKinney, Ophélie Rutschmann, Chiara Toniolo

Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection is initiated by the inhalation and implantation of bacteria in the lung alveoli, where they are phagocytosed by macrophages. Even a single bacterium may be sufficient to initiate infection. Thereafter, the clinical outc ...

AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY2022

Invasive Streptococcal Infection Can Lead to the Generation of Cross-Strain Opsonic Antibodies

Hamed Khakzad

The bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes is a common cause of both mild and severe human diseases resulting in substantial morbidity and mortality each year. No vaccines are available, and our understanding of the antibody response to this human pathogen is st ...

AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY2022

Toward biocontrol of waterborne pathogens: contributions of protists to virus removal and associated mechanisms

Margot Ninon Lauren Olive

Human viruses are widespread in the water environment and pose a risk to human health. Wastewater effluents represent the main source of viruses discharge in the environment, leading to contamination of aquatic ecosystems. Viral pathogens can persist on th ...

EPFL2022

Modeling infectious disease dynamics towards informed public health interventions, with applications on COVID-19 and cholera

Joseph Chadi Benoit Lemaitre

Emerging and existing infectious diseases pose a constant threat to individuals and communities across the world. In many cases, the burden of these diseases is preventable through public health interventions. However, taking the right decisions and design ...

EPFL2021

More than seven decades of Acta Tropica: Looking back to move into the future

Akuto Akpedze Konou, Jürg Utzinger

Acta Tropica is an international, peer-reviewed journal advancing scientific research in the fields of tropical medicine and parasitology. This article elucidates the rich history of the journal and speculates about its future. Acta Tropica was launched in ...

2022

Structural Basis of Ligand Selectivity by a Bacterial Adhesin Lectin Involved in Multispecies Biofilm Formation

Corey Alfred Stevens

Carbohydrate recognition by lectins governs critical host-microbe interactions. MpPA14 (Marinomonas primoryensis PA14 domain) lectin is a domain of a 1.5-MDa adhesin responsible for a symbiotic bacterium-diatom interaction in Antarctica. Here, we show that ...

Amer Soc Microbiology2021

An In Vivo Microfluidic Study of Bacterial Load Dynamics and Absorption in the C. elegans Intestine

Thomas Lehnert, Martinus Gijs, Vittorio Viri, Maël Arveiler

Caenorhabditiselegans (C. elegans) has gained importance as a model for studying host-microbiota interactions and bacterial infections related to human pathogens. Assessing the fate of ingested bacteria in the worm's intestine is therefore of great interes ...

MDPI2021

Digital proximity tracing on empirical contact networks for pandemic control

Marcel Salathé

Digital contact tracing is a relevant tool to control infectious disease outbreaks, including the COVID-19 epidemic. Early work evaluating digital contact tracing omitted important features and heterogeneities of real-world contact patterns influencing con ...

Nature Research2021

Hookworms Evade Host Immunity by Secreting a Deoxyribonuclease to Degrade Neutrophil Extracellular Traps

Manuel Kulagin, Arne Seitz, Nicola Harris, Romain Guiet, Beatrice Volpe, Kathleen Shah, Tiffany Babette Angélique Bouchery, Mati André Marie Moyat

Hookworms cause a major neglected tropical disease, occurring after larvae penetrate the host skin. Neutrophils are phagocytes that kill large pathogens by releasing neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs), but whether they target hookworms during skin infec ...

CELL PRESS2020