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1. A generalized ODE susceptible-infectious-susceptible compartmental model with potentially periodic behavior

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.idm.2023.11.007  

   Greenhalgh, Scott ; Dumas, Anna ( December 2023 , Infectious Disease Modelling)

   Differential equation compartmental models are crucial tools for forecasting and analyzing disease trajectories. Among these models, those dealing with only susceptible and infectious individuals are particularly useful as they offer closed-form expressions for solutions, namely the logistic equation. However, the logistic equation has limited ability to describe disease trajectories since its solutions must converge monotonically to either the disease-free or endemic equilibrium, depending on the parameters. Unfortunately, many diseases exhibit periodic cycles, and thus, do not converge to equilibria. To address this limitation, we developed a generalized susceptible-infectious-susceptible compartmental model capable of accurately incorporating the duration of infection distribution and describing both periodic and non-periodic disease trajectories. We characterized how our model’s parameters influence its behavior and applied the model to predict gonorrhea incidence in the US, using Akaike Information Criteria to inform on its merit relative to the traditional SIS model. The significance of our work lies in providing a novel susceptible-infected-susceptible model whose solutions can have closed-form expressions that may be periodic or non-periodic depending on the parameterization. Our work thus provides disease modelers with a straightforward way to investigate the potential periodic behavior of many diseases and thereby may aid ongoing efforts to prevent recurrent outbreaks. 

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2. Ordered patterning of the sensory system is susceptible to stochastic features of gene expression

   https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.53638  

   Giri, Ritika ; Papadopoulos, Dimitrios K ; Posadas, Diana M ; Potluri, Hemanth K ; Tomancak, Pavel ; Mani, Madhav ; Carthew, Richard W ( February 2020 , eLife)

   Sensory neuron numbers and positions are precisely organized to accurately map environmental signals in the brain. This precision emerges from biochemical processes within and between cells that are inherently stochastic. We investigated impact of stochastic gene expression on pattern formation, focusing on senseless (sens), a key determinant of sensory fate in Drosophila. Perturbing microRNA regulation or genomic location of sens produced distinct noise signatures. Noise was greatly enhanced when both sens alleles were present in homologous loci such that each allele was regulated in trans by the other allele. This led to disordered patterning. In contrast, loss of microRNA repression of sens increased protein abundance but not sensory pattern disorder. This suggests that gene expression stochasticity is a critical feature that must be constrained during development to allow rapid yet accurate cell fate resolution. 

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3. Marginal Reefs Under Stress: Physiological Limits Render Galápagos Corals Susceptible to Ocean Acidification and Thermal Stress

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2021AV000509  

   Thompson, Diane ; McCulloch, Malcolm ; Cole, Julia E. ; Reed, Emma V. ; D’Olivo, Juan P. ; Dyez, Kelsey ; Lofverstrom, Marcus ; Lough, Janice ; Cantin, Neal ; Tudhope, Alexander W. ; et al ( February 2022 , AGU Advances)
4. Compaction and Strength Characteristics of Engineered Water Repellent Frost Susceptible Soils

   https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784484661.047  

   Malisher, Mackenzie ; Daniels, John ; Uduebor, Micheal ; Saulick, Yunesh ( March 2023 , GeoCongress 2023)
5. Inter-outbreak stability reflects the size of the susceptible pool and forecasts magnitudes of seasonal epidemics

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10099-y  

   Rypdal, Martin ; Sugihara, George ( December 2019 , Nature Communications)