François G. Feugier
03/11/11, 13:30 at Room 3631 (6th floor of building 3 of the Faculty of Sciences)
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In spite of the effort to fight Malaria, the size of the phenomenon is not
decreasing. Furthermore, the resistance to the widest used drugs has spread
since 1960. Those drugs have the characteristic to be long lasting in the
organism. Since using one drug is not enough, new strategies use a
combination of two drugs to take advantage of the multiplicative effect of
mutation probabilities. Since the probability of mutation to be resistant
to one drug is nevertheless low, the probability to be resistant to two
drugs can be thought to be the product of both probabilities.
I tried to simulate the evolution of the transmission of resistance to the
two drugs entering in the combination, using a model of differential equations.
First, I simulated the comportment of the population of parasites in
presence of immune cells, and without drug, so I could estimate the time
for the symptoms (3% of parasitemia) of the disease to emerge. I added then
one drug at this moment (9th day). Has we could imagine, all the sensitive
parasites disappeared, leaving only those resistant. Then the immune cells
eliminated all the remaining parasites. The cumulative production of
resistant gametocytes (those transmitted by the mosquito) was very high
(concentration reached 1e6 /ml after 20 days).
I tested the length of protection of the patient with drug combination,
against new infestation. |
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We observe network formation in many situations, from blood veines formation to pattern formation of vascular network in plants' leaves. In the latter, we know that Auxin, a phytohormone, is sufficient to induce differenciation of cells into vascular form. Auxin is produced in apical areas of shoots, and is actively pumped to the roots. It is known that the flaw of Auxin is due to polarity and position of transportation proteins in the plasmic membrane of cells. But we can observe loops in the network of leaves, which is a paradox in polarity of cells. At one point of the loop one cell must be at egal distance in the two directions of the roots. So it can not be polarized. Until now, several models of leaves pattern formation gave patterns similar to primary veines, but no models dealt with secondary or tertiary veines formation, or even with loops. We investigate a model taking in account the polarity of cells, according to concentration of transportation proteins in cells membran, and the differenciation into vascular cells. We think the position of Auxin production sites or alternatively changing position could generate the same loops as observed in natural leaves and may be sufficient to product secondary and tertiary networks. |
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