A5013604781- Species Distribution and Climate Change
- Evolution and Genetic Dynamics
- Animal Ecology and Behavior Studies
- Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies
- Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models
- Plant and animal studies
- Trypanosoma species research and implications
- Viral Infections and Vectors
- Insect symbiosis and bacterial influences
- Mosquito-borne diseases and control
- Research on Leishmaniasis Studies
- Forest Insect Ecology and Management
- Insect and Arachnid Ecology and Behavior
- Ecosystem dynamics and resilience
- Rabies epidemiology and control
- Animal Behavior and Reproduction
- Physiological and biochemical adaptations
- Bat Biology and Ecology Studies
- Poxvirus research and outbreaks
- Dengue and Mosquito Control Research
- Diffusion and Search Dynamics
- Genetic Neurodegenerative Diseases
- Genetic diversity and population structure
- Vector-borne infectious diseases
- Malaria Research and Control
University of Glasgow
2016-2025
Glasgow Centre for Population Health
2016-2025
Animal and Plant Health Agency
2025
City of Glasgow College
2024
University of Alberta
2005-2009
Realistic measures of biodiversity should reflect not only the relative abundances species, but also differences between them. We present a natural family diversity taking both factors into account. This is just another addition to already long list indices. Instead, single formula subsumes many most popular indices, including Shannon's, Simpson's, species richness, and Rao's quadratic entropy. These indices can then be used understood in unified way, relationships them are made plain. The...
Mosquito-borne diseases cause substantial mortality and morbidity worldwide. These impacts are widely predicted to increase as temperatures warm extreme precipitation events become more frequent, since mosquito biology disease ecology strongly linked environmental conditions. However, direct evidence linking change changes in mosquito-borne is rare, the ecological mechanisms that may underpin such poorly understood. Environmental drivers, temperature, can have non-linear, opposing on...
Several human genetic diseases are associated with inheriting an abnormally large unstable DNA simple sequence repeat. These sequences mutate, by changing the number of repeats, many times during lifetime those affected, a bias towards expansion. somatic changes lead not only to presence cells different numbers repeats in same tissue, but also produce increasingly longer contributing progressive nature symptoms. Modelling progression repeat length throughout individuals has potential for...
Abstract Safeguarding global health is a moving target, with changes in climate and human activity raising new threats to public health, animal welfare. Decision support the context of management requires tools capable making sense large volumes complex multidisciplinary evidence. A One Health living risk assessment tool, L'ORA, was developed assess incursion for zoonotic diseases using approach allowing automatic updates assessment. L'ORA estimates as resultant four steps: 1) Disease...
Mosquito-borne diseases (MBDs) pose increasing threats under future climate change scenarios and an understanding of mosquito population dynamics is pivotal to predicting risk MBDs. Most models that describe often assume adult life-history independent age yet senescence known affect mortality, fecundity other key biological traits. Despite this, little about the effects at level population, especially varying temperature scenarios. We develop a stage-structured delayed differential equations...
Increasing availability of pathogen genomic data offers new opportunities to understand the fundamental mechanisms immune evasion and population dynamics during chronic infection. Motivated by growing knowledge on antigenic variation system sleeping sickness parasite, African trypanosome, we introduce a mechanistic framework for modeling within‐host infection dynamics. Our analysis focuses first single parasitemia peak then multiple peaks that rely stochastic switching between groups...
Antigenic variation is employed by many pathogens to evade the host immune response, and Trypanosoma brucei has evolved a complex system achieve this phenotype, involving sequential use of variant surface glycoprotein (VSG) genes encoded from large repertoire ~2,000 genes. T. express multiple, sometimes closely related, VSGs in population at any one time, ability resolve analyse diversity been limited. We applied long read sequencing (PacBio) VSG amplicons generated blood extracted batches...
Many mosquito-borne diseases exhibit substantial seasonality, due to strong links between environmental variables and vector pathogen life-cycles. Further, a range of density-dependent density-independent biotic abiotic processes affect the phenology mosquito populations, with potentially large knock-on effects for dynamics disease transmission. Whilst it is understood that seasonal population levels, not clear how these interact temporally shape peaks troughs. Due this, paucity...
Vector-borne diseases (VBDs), such as dengue, Zika, West Nile virus (WNV) and tick-borne encephalitis, account for substantial human morbidity worldwide have expanded their range into temperate regions in recent decades. Climate change has been proposed a likely driver of past future expansion, however, the complex ecology host vector populations interactions with each other, environmental variables land-use changes makes understanding impacts climate on VBDs challenging. We present an...
Many pathogens evade host immunity by periodically changing the proteins they express on their surface — a phenomenon termed antigenic variation. An extreme form of variation, based around switching composition variant glycoprotein (VSG) coat, is exhibited African trypanosome Trypanosoma brucei, which causes human disease. The molecular details VSG in T. brucei have been extensively studied over last three decades, revealing increasing detail machinery and mechanisms expression controlled...
An important problem in spatial ecology is to understand how population-scale patterns emerge from individual-level birth, death, and movement processes. These processes, which depend on local landscape characteristics, vary spatially may exhibit sharp transitions through behavioural responses habitat edges, leading discontinuous population densities. Such systems can be modelled using reaction-diffusion equations with interface conditions that capture behaviour at patch boundaries. In this...
Diversity measurement underpins the study of biological systems, but measures used vary across disciplines. Despite their common use and broad utility, no unified framework has emerged for measuring, comparing partitioning diversity. The introduction information theory into diversity laid foundations, is incomplete without ability to partition diversity, which central fundamental questions life sciences: How do we prioritise communities conservation? identify reservoirs sources pathogenic...
Population growth metrics such as R 0 are usually asymmetric functions of temperature, with cold-skewed curves arising when the positive effects a temperature increase outweigh negative effects, and warm-skewed in opposite case. Classically, interpreted more beneficial to species under climate warming, because cold-skewness implies increased population over larger proportion species's fundamental thermal niche than warm-skewness. However, inference based on shape fitness curve alone, without...
Understanding how cycles of forest-defoliating insects are affected by forest destruction is major importance for management. Achieving such an understanding with data alone difficult, however, because population typically driven species interactions that highly nonlinear. We therefore constructed a mathematical model to investigate the effects on defoliator cycles, focusing parasitoids. Our shows can increase density when parasitoids disperse much farther than defoliators benefits reduced...
Abstract There has been growing emphasis on the role that crop wild relatives might play in supporting highly selected agriculturally valuable species face of climate change. In were domesticated many thousands years ago, distinguishing populations from escaped feral forms can be challenging, but reintroducing variation either source could supplement current cultivated forms. For economically important cabbages (Brassicaceae: Brassica oleracea ), “wild” occur throughout Europe little is...