Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) assays are a standard approach for quantifying kinetic parameters in antibody-antigen binding reactions. Classical SPR approaches ignore the bivalent structure of antibodies, and use simplified ODE models to estimate effective reaction rates for such interactions. In this work we develop a new SPR protocol, coupling a model that explicitly accounts for the bivalent nature of such interactions and the limited spatial distance over which such interactions can occur, to a SPR assay that provides more features in the generated data. Our approach allows the estimation of bivalent binding kinetics and the spatial extent over which antibodies and antigens can interact, while also providing substantially more robust fits to experimental data compared to classical bivalent ODE models. I will present our new modeling and parameter estimation approach, and demonstrate how it is being used to study interactions between antibodies and spike protein. I will also explain how we make the overall parameter estimation problem computationally feasible via the construction of a surrogate approximation to the (computationally-expensive) particle model. The latter enables fitting of model parameters via standard optimization approaches.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are membrane receptors that play a pivotal role in the regulation of reproduction and behavior in humans. Upon binding to specific ligands, they trigger a local cAMP production. Activated receptor are then internalized to different endosomal compartments where they can continue signaling before being recycled or destroyed. Recent studies showed that the different pools of cAMP have different effect on the cell.
In the first part of the talk, I will present a piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP) of intracellular signaling. The stochastic part of the model accounts for formation, coagulation, fragmentation and recycling of intracellular vesicles which contain the receptor, whereas the deterministic part of the model represents evolution of chemical reactions due to signaling activity of the receptor. We are interested in the existence of and convergence to a stationary measure. I will present different cases for which we were able to obtain results in this direction.
In the second part of the talk, I will present the numerical workflow (SBML, PEtab and PyPESTO) we use to fit ODEs model of GPCR signaling to longitudinal measure of chemical concentrations (BRET data).

We introduce and analyze a size-structured oocyte population model, with non local nonlinearities on recruitment, growth and mortality rates to take into account interactions between cells. We pay special attention to the form of the recruitment term, and its influence on the asymptotic behavior of the cell population.
This model is well-suited for representing oocyte population dynamics within the fish ovary. The nonlocal nonlinearities enable us to capture the diverse feedback mechanisms acting on the growth of oocytes of varying sizes and on the recruitment of new oocytes.
We firstly investigate the existence and uniqueness of global bounded solutions by transforming the partial differential equation into an equivalent system of integral equations, which can be solved using the Contraction Mapping Principle.
In a second step, we investigate the asymptotic behavior of the model. Under an additional assumption regarding the form of the growth rate, we can, with the use of a classical time-scaling transformation, reduce the study to that of a equation with linear growth speed and nonlinear inflow boundary condition. Using arguments from the theory of abstract semilinear Cauchy problems, we investigate the local stability of stationary solutions of this equation by reducing it to a characteristic equation involving the eigenvalues of the linearized problem around equilibrium states.
When the mortality rate is zero, the study of existence and stability of stationary solutions is simplified. Explicit calculations can be carried out in certain interesting cases.

Stochastic modeling and analysis can help answer pressing medical questions. In this talk, I will attempt to justify this claim by describing recent work on two problems in medicine. The first problem concerns ovarian tissue cryopreservation, which is a proven tool to preserve ovarian follicles prior to gonadotoxic treatments. Can this procedure be applied to healthy women to delay or eliminate menopause? How can it be optimized? The second problem concerns medication nonadherence. What should you do if you miss a dose of medication? How can physicians design dosing regimens that are robust to missed/late doses? I will describe (a) how stochastics theory offers insights into these questions and (b) the mathematical questions that emerge from this investigation. The first problem is based on joint work with Joshua Johnson (University of Colorado School of Medicine), John Emerson (Yale University), and Kutluk Oktay (Yale School of Medicine).

Despite the impressive performance of rituximab (R) containing regimens like R-CHOP in CD20+ Non-Hodgkinâ??s Lymphoma (NHL), 30-60% of R-naïve NHL patients are estimated to be resistant, and approximately 60% of those patients will not respond to subsequent single agent R treatment. Given that antibody dependent cell mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC) and phagocytosis (ADCP) are thought to be the major mechanisms of action of Rituximab, increasing the activation levels of natural killer (NK) and macrophage (MP) cells may be one strategy for overcoming R resistance.

During (and after) the Fields Institute Industrial Problem Solving Workshop in August 2019, academic participants and industry mentors developed and calibrated to literature data a quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) model of ADCC/ADCP to interrogate which mechanisms of R resistance could be overcome by increased NK or MP activation, and how much effector cell activation would be required to overcome a given degree and mechanism of R resistance.

This work was motivated by a real-world pharmaceutical drug development question, and the academic-industry interactions during and after the workshop resulted in sharknado plots as well as a published QSP model (presented at American Association of Cancer Research Annual Meeting, 2021) that was able to address some of the key questions around overcoming R resistance. The published model was then incorporated into an in-house QSP model supporting the development of a Takeda investigational drug which is being developed to restore R sensitivity in an R-resistant patient population.

Strikingly regular, large-scale patterns of vegetation growth were first documented by aerial photography in the Horn of Africa circa 1950 and are now known to exist in drylands across the globe. The patterns often appear on very gently sloped terrain as bands of dense vegetation alternating with bare soil, and models suggest that they may be a strategy for maximizing usage of the limited water available. A particular challenge for modeling these patterns is appropriately resolving fast processes such as surface water flow during rainstorms while still being able to capture slow dynamics such as the uphill migration of the vegetation bands, which has been observed to occur on the scale of a band width per century. We propose a pulsed-precipitation model that treats rainstorms as instantaneous kicks to the soil water as it interacts with vegetation on the timescale of plant growth. We use a stochastic rainfall model with the influence of fast storm-level hydrology captured by the spatial distribution of the soil water kicks. The model allows for predictions about the influence of storm characteristics on the large-scale patterns. Analysis and simulations suggest that the distance water travels on the surface before infiltrating into the soil during a typical storm plays a key role in determining the spacing between the bands.

Building models for biological, chemical, and physical systems has traditionally relied on domain specific intuition about which interaction and features most strongly influence a system. Statistical methods based in information criteria provide a framework to balance likelihood and model complexity. Recently developed for and applied to dynamical systems, sparse optimization strategies can select a subset of terms from a library that best describe data, automatically interfering model structure. I will discuss my group's application and development of data driven methods for model selection to 1) find simple statistical models to use wastewater surveillance to track the COVID pandemic and 2) recover chaotic systems models from data with hidden variables. I'll briefly discuss current preliminary work and roadblocks in developing new methods for model selection of biological metabolic and regulatory networks.

The three-dimensional higher-order structure of biomolecules determines their functionality. While assessing primary structure is fairly easily accessible, reconstruction of higher order structure is costly. It often requires elaborate correction of atomic clashes, frequently not fully successful. Using RNA data, we describe a purely statistical method, learning error correction, drawing power from a two-scale approach. Our microscopic scale describes single suites by dihedral angles of individual atom bonds; here, addressing the challenge of torus principal component analysis (PCA) leads to a fundamentally new approach to PCA building on principal nested spheres by Jung et al. (2012). Based on an observed relationship with a mesoscopic scale, landmarks describing several suites, we use Fréchet means for angular shape and size-and-shape, correcting within-suite-backbone-to-backbone clashes. We validate this method by comparison to reconstructions obtained from simulations approximating biophysical chemistry and illustrate its power by the RNA example of SARS-CoV-2.

This is joint work with Benjamin Eltzner, Kanti V. Mardia and Henrik Wiechers.

Literature:

Eltzner, B., Huckemann, S. F., Mardia, K. V. (2018): Torus principal component analysis with applications to RNA structure. Ann. Appl. Statist. 12(2), 1332?1359.

Jung, S., Dryden, I. L., Marron, J. S. (2012): Analysis of principal nested spheres. Biometrika, 99 (3), 551-568

Mardia, K. V., Wiechers, H., Eltzner, B., Huckemann, S. F. (2022). Principal component analysis and clustering on manifolds. Journal of Multivariate Analysis, 188, 104862, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047259X21001408

Wiechers, H., Eltzner, B., Mardia, K. V., Huckemann, S. F. (2021). Learning torus PCA based classification for multiscale RNA backbone structure correction with application to SARS-CoV-2. To appear in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C, bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.06.455406

Circadian rhythms are biological oscillations that align our physiology and behavior with the 24-hour environmental cycles conferred by the Earthâ??s rotation. In this talk, I will discuss two projects that focus on circadian clock cells in the brain and the entrainment of circadian rhythms to the light-dark cycle. Most of what we know about the electrical activity of circadian clock neurons comes from studies of nocturnal (night-active) rodents, hindering the translation of this knowledge to diurnal (day-active) humans. In the first part of the talk, we use data assimilation and patch-clamp recordings from the diurnal rodent Rhabdomys pumilio to build the first mathematical models of the electrophysiology of circadian neurons in a day-active species. We find that the electrical activity of circadian neurons is similar overall between nocturnal and diurnal rodents but that there are some interesting differences in their responses to inhibition. In the second part of the talk, we use tools from dynamical systems theory to study the reentrainment of a model of the human circadian pacemaker following perturbations that simulate jet lag. We show that the reentrainment dynamics are organized by invariant manifolds of fixed points of a 24-hour stroboscopic map and use these manifolds to explain a rapid reentrainment phenomenon that occurs under certain jet lag scenarios.

We present two models of perpetrators' decision-making in extracting resources from a protected area. It is assumed that the authorities conduct surveillance to counter the extraction activities, and that perpetrators choose their post-extraction paths to balance the time/hardship of travel against the expected losses from a possible detection. In our first model, the authorities are assumed to use ground patrols and the protected resources are confiscated as soon as the extractor is observed with them. The perpetrators' path-planning is modeled using the optimal control of randomly-terminated process. In our second model, the authorities use aerial patrols, with the apprehension of perpetrators and confiscation of resources delayed until their exit from the protected area. In this case the path-planning is based on multi-objective dynamic programming. Our efficient numerical methods are illustrated on several examples with complicated geometry and terrain of protected areas, non-uniform distribution of protected resources, and spatially non-uniform detection rates due to aerial or ground patrols.

The notochord, the defining feature of chordates, is a pressurized tube which actuates elongation of the chordate embryo. The zebrafish notochord consists of large vacuolated cells surrounded by a thin sheath. We characterized the patterns of the cellsâ?? packing, and their relationship to the known regular patterns from the study of foams, and irregular patterns in a gel bead system. Disruption of the wild type packing pattern leads to developmental defects. We characterize the bifurcations between the relevant regular patterns in terms of nondimensional geometrical and mechanical ratios, and suggest an important developmental role for the eccentric "staircase" pattern.