Strontium can replace calcium in triggering neurotransmitter release, although peak release is reduced and the duration of release is prolonged. Strontium has therefore become useful in probing release, but its mechanism of action is not well understood. Here we study the action of strontium at the granule cell to Purkinje cell synapse in mouse cerebellar slices. Presynaptic residual strontium ...

A deterministic model for the transmission dynamics of a strain of dengue disease, which allows transmission by exposed humans and mosquitoes, is developed and rigorously analysed. The model, consisting of seven mutually-exclusive compartments representing the human and vector dynamics, has a locally-asymptotically stable disease-free equilibrium (DFE) whenever a certain epidemiological thresho...

In the light of the latest results concerning the synaptic paired pulse depression, facilitation [Thomson et al., 1993 a,b,c], its effects on long term potentiation (LTP) and depression (LTD) [Markram et al., 1996], and spike frequency adaptation, the question how the neurons communicate and what are meaningful signals in the neural information processing has to be reconsidered. Modeling these ...

Mathematical models have the potential to be useful to forecast the course of epidemics. In this chapter, a family of logistic patch models are preliminarily evaluated for use in disease modeling and forecasting. Here we also derive the logistic equation in an infectious disease transmission context based on population behavior and used it for forecasting the trajectories of the 2013-2015 Ebola...

We consider the problem of reconstructing the dynamic state matrix of transmission power grids from timestamped PMU measurements in the regime of ambient fluctuations. Using a maximum likelihood based approach, we construct a family of convex estimators that adapt to the structure of the problem depending on the available prior information. The proposed method is fully data-driven and does not ...

A major Ebola outbreak occurs in West Africa since March 2014, being the deadliest epidemic in history. As an infectious disease epidemiology, Ebola is the most lethal and is moving faster than in previous outbreaks. On 8 August 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. Last update on 7 July 2015 by WHO reports 27 609 cas...

Competition–colonization trade-off models explain the coexistence of competing species in terms of a trade-off between competitive ability and the ability to colonize competitor-free patches of habitat. A simple prediction of these models is that inferior competitors will be superior dispersers. This prediction has seldom been tested in natural populations because measuring dispersal is difficu...

The infectious activity of coxsackievirus B1 (CV-B1) in Taiwan was high from 2008 to 2010, following an alarming increase in severe neonate disease in the United States (US). To examine the relationship between CV-B1 strains isolated in Taiwan and those from other parts of the world, we performed a phylodynamic study using VP1 and partial 3Dpol (414 nt) sequences from 22 strains of CV-B1 isolat...

Previously we have formulated transmission models of untreated tuberculosis epidemics (Blower et al., Nature, Medicine 1 (1995), 815-821); in this paper, we present time-dependent uncertainty and sensitivity analyses in order to quantitatively understand the transmission dynamics of tuberculosis epidemics in the absence of treatment. The time-dependent uncertainty analysis enabled us to evaluat...

BACKGROUND A cross-sectional, age-stratified study was conducted to determine varicella-zoster seroprevalence and force of infection in Slovenia. METHODS 3689 serum samples were tested for VZV IgG antibodies with an enzyme immunoassay. Semiparametric and parametric modelling were used to estimate the force of infection. RESULTS Overall, 85.6% of serum samples were seropositive. Age-specific...