The emerging virus CyHV-3 kills up to 70% of a carp population in one outbreak. The dynamics of such an infection are modelled by systems of differential equations. Programming in SciPy is used to solve these systems and predict possible future outbreaks.
According to the theory of dynamical systems, changes in a time series variable result from a set of rules. These rules determine the new values of the variable as a function of the variable itself and the interacting variables. When studying biological systems the set of rules is unknown. However, Takens's Theorem proves that the information of the unknown variables are encoded in the observed time series and that the trajectory can be reconstructed. Using R and C, we analyse the reconstructed trajectory to get information about the underlying system.
Wolbachia, a vertically transmitted bacterial parasite, has a hard time invading new populations. We investigate coupled coinfections of Wolbachia and viruses that by their interaction shift each others invasion barriers. We simulate the coinfection dynamics using NumPy and R for programming.
Mosquitoes are main vectors for tropical diseases. As most arthropods, mosquitoes can be infected with the intracellular bacterium Wolbachia, of which we also analyse the dynamics theoretically. We now use mosquito strains that are either infected or uninfected with Wolbachia to conduct larval density experiments in practice.
We work on a couple of network related issues such as plant pollinator interactions or questions reguarding generalisation or specialisation of pathogens. We use game theory and computer simulations to adress these problems. Moreover we develop a common code base for network analyses at insj.googlecode.com.