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The size of fruit bat colonies ranges from dozens to hundreds of thousands of individuals, depending on the species. While a deterministic modelling approach is appropriate for large colonies, the role of population fluctuations can be all-important for small colonies. From this perspective, we analyse the infection dynamics in small zoonotic niches due to filoviruses, e.g. Ebola. To this end, we perform stochastic numerical simulations and analytical calculations. The inherent stochasticity in ecological processes may play a significant role in driving small populations towards extinction. Here, we reveal that fluctuations can either lead to virus eradication or to sustain infection compared with the deterministic dynamics, depending on the size of the zoonotic niche. Altogether, our findings reveal non-trivial stochastic effects, which can shed light on the infection dynamics in small- and medium-sized bat colonies and help design preventive measures for zoonotic diseases. 

Bacterial proteases are a promising post-translational regulation strategy in synthetic circuits because they recognize specific amino acid degradation tags (degrons) that can be fine-tuned to modulate the degradation levels of tagged proteins. For this reason, recent efforts have been made in the search for new degrons. Here we review the up-to-date applications of degradation tags for circuit engineering in bacteria. In particular, we pay special attention to the effects of degradation bottlenecks in synthetic oscillators and introduce mathematical approaches to study queueing that enable the quantitative modelling of proteolytic queues.