Aaron Fogelson : Two Examples of Chemical Modulation of the Properties and Dynamics of Physiological Gels: Fibrin Formation and Mucin Swelling
- Mathematical Biology ( 120 Views )Gels formed from mixtures of polymers and solvent are ubiquitous in physiological systems. The structure and properties of a gel can change dramatically in response to chemical modulation. Two examples of the influence of chemistry on gel properties will be discussed. The structure of fibrin gels that form during blood clotting is strongly influenced by the concentration of the enzyme thrombin that produces the fibrin monomers from which the gel is built. Presumably at higher thrombin concentrations, fibrin monomers are produced more rapidly from the precursor fibrinogen molecules. I will present an analysis of a possible mechanism of fibrin branching that can explain the sensitivity of fibrin structure to the rate of supply of monomers. Mucin gel is released from vesicles in goblet cells. During this exocytotic process, the polyelectrolyte mucin gel swells to many times its original volume at a very rapid rate. I will present a model in which this swelling is triggered by an exchange of divalent calcium ions in the vesicle and monovalent sodium ions in the extracellular space, and in which the ion concentrations and the rheological properties of the mucin gel determine its equilibrium size and the dynamics of its swelling.
Aziz Yakubu : Mathematical Models of Malaria with Applications to Mali and USA
- Mathematical Biology ( 138 Views )In this talk, we will introduce a deterministic malaria model for determining the drug administration protocol that leads to the smallest first malaria episodes during the wet season. To explore the effects of administering the malaria drug on different days during wet season while minimizing the potential harmful effects of drug overdose, we will define 40 drug administration protocols. Our results fit well with the clinical studies of Coulibaly et al. at a site in Mali. In addition, we will provide protocols that lead to small number of first malaria episodes during the wet season than the protocol of Coulibaly et al. In the second part of the talk, we will use our malaria model to "capture" the 2013 Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported data on the 2011 number of imported malaria cases in the US. Furthermore; we will use our "fitted" malaria models for the top 20 countries of malaria acquisition by US residents to study the impact of protecting US residents from malaria infection when they travel to malaria endemic areas, the impact of protecting residents of malaria endemic regions from mosquito bites and the impact of killing mosquitoes in those endemic areas on the 2013 CDC malaria surveillance data.
Avner Friedman : Conservation laws in mathematical biology
- Mathematical Biology ( 111 Views )Many mathematical models in biology can be described by a system of hyperbolic conservation laws with nonlinear and nonlocal coefficients. In order to determine these coefficients one needs to solve auxiliary systems of equations, for example elliptic or parabolic PDEs, which are coupled to the hyperbolic equations. In this talk we give several examples: The growth of tumors, the shrinking of dermal wounds, T cell differentiation, the growth of drug resistant bacteria in hospitals, and the transport of molecules along microtubules in axon. In these examples, the auxiliary systems range from elliptic-parabolic free boundary problems to nonlocal ODEs. Motivated by biological questions, we shall describe mathematical results regarding properties of the solutions of the conservation laws. For example, we shall determine the stability of spherical tumors and the growth of fingers; we shall discuss conditions for shrinking of the wound; suggest how to reduce the growth of drug resistant bacteria, and derive biologically motivated asymptotic behavior of solutions.
Jake Taylor-King : Generalized Jump Processes and Osteocyte Network Formation
- Mathematical Biology ( 128 Views )My talk will have two parts. PART I, From Birds to Bacteria: Generalised Velocity Jump Processes. There are various cases of animal movement where behaviour broadly switches between two modes of operation, corresponding to a long distance movement state and a resting or local movement state. In this talk, I will give a mathematical description of this process, adapted from Friedrich et. al. (2006). The approach allows the specification any running or waiting time distribution along with any angular and speed distributions. The resulting system of partial integro-differential equations are tumultuous and therefore it is necessary to both simplify and derive summary statistics. We derive an expression for the mean squared displacement, which shows good agreement with experimental data from the bacterium Escherichia coli and the gull Larus fuscus. Finally a large time diffusive approximation is considered via a Cattaneo approximation (Hillen, 2004). This leads to the novel result that the effective diffusion constant is dependent on the mean and variance of the running time distribution but only on the mean of the waiting time distribution. We also consider the Levy regime where the variance of the running distribution tends to infinity. This leads to a fractional diffusion equation for superdiffusive Levy walks and can be solved analytically. Our theory opens up new perspectives both for the systematic derivation of such equations, and for experimental data analysis of intermittent motion. I will also briefly discuss recent developments (by other researchers) within the field of velocity jump processes. PART II: Modelling Osteocyte Network Formation: Healthy and Cancerous Environments. Advanced prostate, breast, and lung cancer can metastasize to bone. In pathological bone, the highly regulated bone remodeling signaling pathway is disrupted. Within bone dendritic osteocytes form a spatial network allowing communication between osteocytes and the osteoblasts located on the bone surface. This communication network facilitates coordinated bone formation. In the presence of a cancerous microenvironment, the morphology of this network changes. Commonly osteocytes appear to be either overdifferentiated (i.e., there are more dendrites) or underdeveloped (i.e., dendrites do not fully form). In addition to structural changes, preliminary studies measuring the number of osteocytes per unit area using pathology slides show that the number density of osteocytes change from healthy to metastatic prostate and breast cancer xenografted mice. We present a stochastic agent-based model for bone formation incorporating osteoblasts and osteocytes that allows us to probe both network structure and number density of osteocytes in bone. Our model both allows for the simulation of our spatial network model and analysis of mean-field equations in the form of integro-partial differential equations. We consider variations of our model to test specific physiological hypotheses related to osteoblast differentiation; for example we can predict how changing measurable biological parameters, such as rates of bone secretion, rates of dendrite growth and rates of osteoblast differentiation can allow for qualitatively different network morphologies, and vice versa. We thenuse our model to hypothesize reasons for the limited efficacy of zoledronate therapy on metastatic breast cancer.
Cristan Tomasetti : Stem cell divisions, somatic mutations, cancer etiology, and cancer prevention
- Mathematical Biology ( 186 Views )Cancers are caused by mutations that may be inherited, induced by environmental factors, or result from DNA replication errors (R). We studied the relationship between the number of normal stem cell divisions and the risk of 17 cancer types in 69 countries throughout the world. The data revealed a strong correlation (median = 0.80) between cancer incidence and normal stem cell divisions in all countries, regardless of their environment. The major role of R mutations in cancer etiology was supported by an independent approach, based solely on cancer genome sequencing and epidemiological data, which suggested that R mutations are responsible for two-thirds of the mutations in human cancers. All of these results are consistent with epidemiological estimates of the fraction of cancers that can be prevented by changes in the environment. Moreover, they accentuate the importance of early detection and intervention to reduce deaths from the many cancers arising from unavoidable R mutations.
Elizabeth Bouzarth : Using Regularized Stokeslets to Model Immersed Biological Fibers
- Mathematical Biology ( 117 Views )The behavior of inextensible fibers immersed in a fluid is of interest in a variety of applications ranging from polymer suspensions to actin filament transport. In these cases, the dynamics of an immersed fiber can play a large role in the observed macroscale fluid dynamics. The method of regularized Stokeslets provides a way to calculate fluid velocities in the Stokes fluid flow regime due to a collection of regularized point-forces without computing fluid velocities on an underlying grid. In this discussion, the method of Regularized Stokeslets will be used to model the dynamics of an inextensible flexible fiber immersed in a two-dimensional cellular background flow in comparison with results found in the experimental and mathematical literature. Studying this scenario with regularized Stokeslets provides insight into the documented stretch-coil transition and macroscale random walk behavior supported by mathematical models and experimental results.
Jim Keener : Mechanisms of length regulation of flagella in Salmonella
- Mathematical Biology ( 104 Views )Abstract: The construction of flagellar motors in motile bacteria such as Salmonella is a carefully regulated genetic process. Among the structures that are built are the hook and the filament. The length of the hook is tightly controlled while the length of filaments is less so. However, if a filament is broken off it will regrow, while a broken hook will not regrow. The question that will be addressed in this talk is how Salmonella detects and regulates the length of these structures. This is related to the more general question of how physical properties (such as size or length) can be detected by chemical signals and what those mechanisms are. In this talk, I will present mathematical models for the regulation of hook and filament length. The model for hook length regulation is based on the hypothesis that the hook length is determined by the rate of secretion of the length regulatory molecule FliK and a cleavage reaction with the gatekeeper molecule FlhB. A stochastic model for this interaction is built and analyzed, showing excellent agreement with hook length data. The model for filament length regulation is based on the hypothesis that the growth of filaments is diffusion limited and is measured by negative feedback involving the regulatory protein FlgM. Thus, the model includes diffusion on a one-dimensional domain with a moving boundary, coupled with a negative feedback chemical network. The model shows excellent qualitative agreement with data, although there are some interesting unresolved issues related to the quantitative results.
Susan Holmes : Computational Tools for Evaluating Phylogenetic and Hierarchical Clustering Trees
- Mathematical Biology ( 112 Views )Inferential summaries of tree estimates are useful in the setting of evolutionary biology, where phylogenetic trees have been built from DNA data since the 1960's. In bioinformatics, psychometrics and data mining, hierarchical clustering techniques output the same mathematical objects, and practitioners have similar questions about the stability and `generalizability' of these summaries. I will present applications of the Billera, Holmes, Vogtman (2001) distance to inferential problems both in the frequentist (bootstrap) and Bayesian contexts. I will compare the tree of trees representation to the Euclidean approximations of treespace made available through Multidimensional Scaling of the matrix of distances between trees. We also provide applications of the distances between trees to hierarchical clustering trees constructed from microarrays and phylogenetic trees of metagenomic data of bacteria in the gut. This talk contains joint work with John Chakerian and Alfred Spormann.
Christine Heitsch : The Combinatorics of RNA Branching
- Mathematical Biology ( 285 Views )Understanding the folding of RNA sequences into three-dimensional structures is one of the fundamental challenges in molecular biology. For example, the branching of an RNA secondary structure is an important molecular characteristic yet difficult to predict correctly, especially for sequences on the scale of viral genomes. However, results from enumerative, probabilistic, analytic, and geometric combinatorics yield insights into RNA structure formation, and suggest new directions in viral capsid assembly.
Mike Kelly : Rate of Adaptation - Fast Mutation Rates
- Mathematical Biology ( 106 Views )In a 2009 paper Yu, Etheridge and Cuthbertson proposed a model that was intended to address two questions. The first was a question related to Muller's ratchet, "What ratio of mutations must be beneficial for the meanfitness of a population to increase in time?" The second question was related to the Hill-Robertson effect, "If many beneficial mutations are introduced into a population, how much will competition slow the rate of adaptation?" They introduced a model of an asexually reproducing population of fixed size N and mutation rate mu and conjectured that the rate of adaptation is O(logN/(log logN)^2) for large N so long as there is some positive ratio of beneficial mutations. I will present an outline of my proof of this conjecture.
Harsh Jain : A delay differential equation model of cancer chemotherapy, with applications to ovarian carcinoma treatment
- Mathematical Biology ( 104 Views )The use of delay differential equations (DDEs) to study biological phenomena has a long history, when the rate of change of model variables depends their previous history. Today, DDEs occupy a central place in models of infectious disease dynamics, epidemiology, ecology and tumor growth. In this talk, I will present a delayed partial differential equation (PDE) model of tumor growth and treatment. The model accounts for cell cycle arrest and cell death induced by chemotherapy, and explicitly includes intracellular signaling pathways relevant to drug action. The model is simplified to give a 1D hyperbolic PDE, which is further reduced to a nonlinear, non-autonomous DDE by projecting along characteristics. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the global stability of the cancer-free equilibrium are derived and conditions under which the system evolves to periodic solutions are determined. This has clinical implications since it leads to a lower bound for the amount of therapy required to affect a cure. Finally, I will present a clinical application of the model, by applying it to the treatment of ovarian cancers. Two types of drugs are considered platinum-based chemotherapeutic agents that are the current standard of care for most solid tumors, and small molecule cell death inducers that are currently under development. The model is calibrated versus in vitro experimental results, and is then used to predict optimal doses and administration time scheduling for the treatment of a tumor growing in vivo.
David Isaacson : Mathematical problems arising in the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.
- Mathematical Biology ( 121 Views )It will be explained how the following problems in the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer have led to mathematical problems: 1. How can one improve the diagnosis of breast cancer? 2. How can one determine the growth rate of a cancer once it has been detected? 3. In which order should drugs be given in order to improve relapse and survival times? The first problem led to the design , construction, and testing of an electrical impedance spectroscopy system combined with an x- ray mammography system. The second problem led to a quantitative model to predict the growth rate of some cancers as a function of the number of Her2 and EGF receptors on the cells involved. The third problem led to quantitative models capable of predicting the outcome of specific chemotherapy regimens used by Bonadonna involving the use of CMF and A (Doxorubicin) for the adjuvant treatment of breast cancer.
Veronica Ciocanel : Stochastic and continuum dynamics in cellular transport
- Mathematical Biology ( 211 Views )The cellular cytoskeleton ensures the dynamic transport, localization, and anchoring of various proteins and vesicles. In the development of egg cells into embryos, messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules bind and unbind to and from cellular roads called microtubules, switching between bidirectional transport, diffusion, and stationary states. Since models of intracellular transport can be analytically intractable, asymptotic methods are useful in understanding effective cargo transport properties as well as their dependence on model parameters. We consider these models in the framework of partial differential equations as well as stochastic processes and derive the effective velocity and diffusivity of cargo at large time for a general class of problems. Including the geometry of the microtubule filaments allows for better prediction of particle localization and for investigation of previously unexplored mechanisms. Our numerical studies incorporating model microtubule structures suggest that anchoring of mRNA-molecular motor complexes may be necessary in localization, to promote healthy development of oocytes into embryos.
Rick Durrett : Spatial evolutionary games with weak selection
- Mathematical Biology ( 152 Views )Recently a mathematical theory has been developed for spatial games with weak selection, i.e., the payoff differences between strategies are small. The key to the analysis is that when space an time are suitably rescaled the limit is partial differential equation (PDE). This approach can be used to analyze all 2 x 2 games, but there are a number of 3 x 3 games for which the behavior of the limiting PDE is not known. In this talk we will describe simulation results for two cases that are not considered by rigorous results: rock-paper scissors and bistable games. We will begin by describing results for a two strategy game that arises from studying pancreatic cancer and shows that theoretical predictions work even when selection is not very weak. This is joint work with Mridu Nanda, a student at North Carolina School for Science and Math.
Yuan Lou : Finding Evolutionarily Stable Strategies
- Mathematical Biology ( 111 Views )From habitat degradation and climate change to spatial spread of invasive species, dispersal plays a central role in determining how organisms cope with a changing environment. How should organisms disperse optimally in heterogeneous environments? I will discuss some recent development on the evolution of dispersal, focusing on evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) for dispersal.
David Basanta : The ecology of cancer: mathematical modelling and clinical implications
- Mathematical Biology ( 165 Views )Decades of research in cancer have yielded scant results other than highlighting the need for new approaches that could go beyond the tried and tested molecular-based ones. Recent clinical studies show that tumour heterogeneity and selection, the ingredients of Darwinian evolution, can explain cancer progression towards malignancy as well as recurrence after treatment. In this talk I will describe mathematical and computational models that explore cancer evolutionary dynamics and that can explain how the interactions between the tumour with its environment (the tumour ecosystem) can yield a better understanding of cancer biology and lead to better and more efficacious treatments for cancer patients.
Darryl Shibata : Reconstructing Human Tumor Ancestries from their Genomes: Making Human Tissues Talk
- Mathematical Biology ( 151 Views )It is well-known that genomes encode ancestry through replication errors - on average the greater the numbers of differences between two genomes, the greater the time since they shared a common ancestor ("molecular clock hypothesis"). This approach is commonly used to infer ancestries of species and populations, and these same tools can be applied to somatic cell evolution, in particular to better infer ancestries of normal and neoplastic tissues. For example, by sampling from opposite sides of the same human colorectal tumor, one can coalesce back to the earliest tumor cells. Such studies reveal that many human colorectal tumors are simple single "Big Bang" expansions, with evidence of neutral evolution during growth. It may be possible to understand in detail what is impossible to directly observe - the first few divisions of human tumors.
Andrew Gillette : Multiscale Diffusion Modeling in Charged and Crowded Biological Environments
- Mathematical Biology ( 109 Views )The macroscopic diffusion constant for small ions in biological environments is in part dependent on the volume excluded by diffusional barriers and by long-range interactions between those barriers and the ion. Increasing excluded volume reduces diffusive transport of the solute, while long-range interactions can either increase or decrease diffusivity, depending on the nature of the potential. My colleagues and I have developed a computational methodology for studying these effects via a homogenized finite element method for the Smoluchowski equation. I will introduce the relevant background, both biological and mathematical, and present our recent results. This work is joint with Peter Kekenes-Huskey (U. Kentucky) and J. Andrew McCammon (UC San Diego).
Chia Lee : Stochastic simulation of biochemical systems with randomly fluctuating rate constants
- Mathematical Biology ( 102 Views )In an experimental study of single enzyme reactions, it has been proposed that the rate constants of the enzymatic reactions fluctuate randomly, according to a given distribution. To quantify the uncertainty arising from random rate constants, it is necessary to investigate how one can simulate such a biochemical system. To do this, we will take the Gillespie's stochastic simulation algorithm for simulation the evolution of the state of a chemical system, and study a modification of the algorithm that incorporates the random rate constants, using in part the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to enact the distribution on the random rate constants. This modified algorithm, when applied to the single enzyme reaction system, produces simulation outputs that are corroborated by the experimental results. This project is in its early stages, and it is hoped that it can subsequently be used as a tool for the estimation or calibration of parameters in the system using experimental data.
Steve Vogel : Lifes Launchers: The Scaling of Bioballistic Projectiles
- Mathematical Biology ( 107 Views )Biological projectiles range from a 10-micrometer spore to a 1-meter leaping mammal. Pre-launch accelerations scale inversely with length, with that of the smallest projectile approaching a million times gravity. These projectiles follow Borelli's rule, that all jumpers should jump to the same height. Nonetheless, his rationale is wrong on at least two accounts. For one thing, it presumes a muscular engine operating with no energy storage, often far from the case. For another, it ignores drag, critical for small projectiles, which operate in an overwhelmingly drag-dominated rather than gravity- dominated domain and whose optimal trajectories look decidedly unfamiliar. But the rule can be given quite a differentand more generalbasis. And a simple dimensionless index helps us anticipate best launch angles and path lengths, these latter illustrated with a simple computer simulation.
Dennis Frank-Ito : The Future of Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling in Assessing Upper Airway Respiratory Physiology
- Mathematical Biology ( 94 Views )The complexity of the human airway coupled with advances in computational technology have led to the growing interest in the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques to simulate airway physiology in order to collect objective data due to inter-individual anatomy and pre- & post-surgical changes. Outcomes from airway surgery are sometimes difficult to predict a priori, and it is not known whether topical medications are reaching target sites within the human air passage. This talk will give an overview of how CFD is used to explore these issues, as well as demonstrate the potential ability of this methodology in pre-surgical planning.
Sorin Mitran : Information Theoretic Projection of Cytoskeleton Dynamics onto Surrogate Cellular Motility Models
- Mathematical Biology ( 99 Views )Cellular motility arises from the interaction of numerous components: actin filaments, ligands, adhesion complexes to name a few. Each individual component exhibits stochastic behavior, yet overall cooperative behavior is observed, and leads to motility. Linking overall cellular motion to the stochastic behavior of its components is a remarkable mathematical challenge. This talk introduces a method to cyclically extract surrogate motility models from detailed stochastic simulation of the components. The starting point is a sampling of the detailed cytoskeleton dynamics over a short time interval. This detailed information is repeatedly projected onto a lower dimensional statistical manifold to obtain a coarse-grained model of the cytoskeleton, from which a surrogate cell model is obtained. The projection operation corresponds to transport along the geodesics of embedded statistical manifolds. The surrogate model is advanced over a larger time interval and then used to recreate the detailed microscopic cytoskeleton state needed to start the next cycle. The procedure is applied to study the behavior of Listeria monocytogenes bacterium and inert models of the motility behavior of this bacterium