Assembly archetypes in ecological communities.

An instrumental discovery in comparative and developmental biology is the existence of assembly archetypes that synthesize the vast diversity of organisms' body plans-from legs and wings to human arms-into simple, interpretable and general design principles. Here, we combine a novel mathematical formalism based on category theory with experimental data to show that similar 'assembly archetypes' exist at the larger organization scale of ecological communities when assembling a species pool across diverse environmental contexts, particularly when species interactions are highly structured. We applied our formalism to clinical data discovering two assembly archetypes that differentiate between healthy and unhealthy human gut microbiota. The concept of assembly archetypes and the methods to synthesize them can pave the way to discovering the general assembly principles of the ecological communities we observe in nature.

Bayesian analysis of Glucose dynamics during the Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT).

This paper proposes a model that considers the action and timing of insulin and glucagon in glucose homeostasis after an oral stimulus. We use the Bayesian paradigm to infer kinetic rates, namely insulin and glucagon secretion, gastrointestinal emptying, and basal glucose concentration in blood. We identify two insulin scores related to glucose concentration in both blood and the gastrointestinal tract. The scores allow us to suggest a classification for individuals with impaired insulin sensitivity.

Modeling the transmission dynamics and the impact of the control interventions for the COVID-19 epidemic outbreak.

In this paper we develop a compartmental epidemic model to study the transmission dynamics of the COVID-19 epidemic outbreak, with Mexico as a practical example. In particular, we evaluate the theoretical impact of plausible control interventions such as home quarantine, social distancing, cautious behavior and other self-imposed measures. We also investigate the impact of environmental cleaning and disinfection, and government-imposed isolation of infected individuals. We use a Bayesian approach and officially published data to estimate some of the model parameters, including the basic reproduction number. Our findings suggest that social distancing and quarantine are the winning strategies to reduce the impact of the outbreak. Environmental cleaning can also be relevant, but its cost and effort required to bring the maximum of the outbreak under control indicate that its cost-efficacy is low.