Epidemiological processes leave a fingerprint in the pattern of genetic structure of virus populations. Here, we provide a new method to infer epidemiological parameters directly from viral sequence data. The method is based on phylogenetic analysis using a birth-death model (BDM) rather than the commonly used coalescent as the model for the epidemiological transmission of the pathogen. Using t...

Background: Infertility is one of the most devastating diagnoses for any woman or man to face, and assisted reproductive technology (ART) is a great gift of life given to these people. There are many factors influencing success rate of ART but quality of embryos is believed to improve this rate and therefore is a major challenge. This paper will focus on examining factors affecting the number o...

We give a definition of a net reproductive number R (0) for periodic matrix models of the type used to describe the dynamics of a structured population with periodic parameters. The definition is based on the familiar method of studying a periodic map by means of its (period-length) composite. This composite has an additive decomposition that permits a generalization of the Cushing-Zhou definit...

We study the spreading dynamics on graphs with a power law degree distribution pk approximately k-gamma, with 2<gamma<3, as an example of a branching process with a diverging reproductive number. We provide evidence that the divergence of the second moment of the degree distribution carries as a consequence a qualitative change in the growth pattern, deviating from the standard exponential grow...

The reproduction of spindle poles is a key event in the cell's preparation for mitosis. To gain further insight into how this process is controlled, we systematically characterized the ultrastructure of spindle poles whose reproductive capacity had been experimentally altered. In particular, we wanted to determine if the ability of a pole to reproduce before the next division is related to the ...