Influenza is an infectious respiratory illness caused by influenza viruses. Every year, it causes up to one billion cases of disease worldwide. Despite its high disease burden, the transmission pathway of influenza remains subject to debate. There is incre ...
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 ...
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 ...
In settings with high tuberculosis (TB) endemicity, distinct genotypes of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) often differ in prevalence. However, the factors leading to these differences remain poorly understood. Here we studied the MTBC populat ...
A key attribute of persistent or recurring bacterial infections is the ability of the pathogen to evade the host's immune response. Many Enterobacteriaceae express type 1 pili, a pre-adapted virulence trait, to invade host epithelial cells and establish pe ...
Background Hansen's disease (leprosy), widespread in medieval Europe, is today mainly prevalent in tropical and subtropical regions with around 200,000 new cases reported annually. Despite its long history and appearance in historical records, its origins ...
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 ...
Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) is one of the most common viruses latently infecting humans. Little is known about the impact of human genetic variation on the large inter-individual differences observed in response to EBV infection. To search for a potential imp ...
We argue that frequent sampling of the fraction ofa priorinon-symptomatic but infectious humans (either by random or cohort testing) significantly improves the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, when compared to intervention strategies relying on data fr ...
The HIV-1 reservoir is the major hurdle to curing HIV-1. However, the impact of the viral genome on the HIV-1 reservoir, i.e. its heritability, remains unknown. We investigate the heritability of the HIV-1 reservoir size and its long-term decay by analyzin ...
