Author Archives: joaobxavier

Journal Covers

In scientific publishing, the quality of a study is in the details of its findings, methodology, and conclusions. Journal covers offer an artistic snapshot, asking readers to delve deeper. Our work was featured on the covers of Developmental Cell and … Continue reading

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Mathematical models for systems biology of infectious diseases

Mathematical models help make sense of complex biological systems. Models that are accurate enough can even predict how the system responds to perturbations. This can be used for example to devise a public health strategy to stop an infection from … Continue reading

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Mathematical models to optimize the scheduling of cancer treatments

This review is on how mathematical models can be used to make the best of cancer drugs already available. The review precedes our research paper on pulsed treatment which is about to come out soon in the AACR journal Molecular … Continue reading

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“How to win against competitors and influence your neighbors”

Read the blog post by Hilary, Yanyan and Kevin on Nature’s eco and evo community. Here’s the link to the original paper:Spatial-temporal dynamics of a microbial cooperative behavior resistant to cheating.Hilary Monaco, Kevin S. Liu, Tiago Sereno, Maxime Deforet, Bradford … Continue reading

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10+ years of swarming reviewed

I filmed my first swarm on February 29, 2008. I placed the inoculated Petri dish under a video camera, inside a temperature-controlled room set to 37C. The camera took a picture at every 10 minutes for 24 h, which I … Continue reading

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The impact of the gut microbiota on circulating leukocyte levels

We posted our new study on bioRxiv were we compared the impact of the microbiota white blood cells dynamics in patients receiving hematopoietic cell transplantation. We estimate that microbiota diversity can have a suppressive effect on circulating lymphocytes similar to … Continue reading

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Antibiotics and weight gain

Martin Blaser’s lab showed a few years ago that exposing mice to low doses of antibiotics very early in their lives changes their gut microbiota and makes the mice gain more fat and gain more body weight later in life. … Continue reading

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Results from auto-FMT pilot

Our team at Memorial Sloan Kettering has been investigating the intestinal microbiota of patients receiving bone marrow transplantations for more than eight years now. We have found through several studies that these patients lose important healthy bacteria from their microbiota … Continue reading

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Machine learning in simple biochemical networks

Our bow-tie paper is finally out. Here’s the teaser: How does evolution shape living organisms that seem so well adapted that they could be intelligently designed? Here, we address this question by analyzing a simple biochemical network that directs social … Continue reading

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Metabolism and the evolution of social behavior

Kerry Boyle’s PhD paper is out today. It’s still in the early-view, unformatted version but it is now officially published! In this paper we addressed a fundamental question: Why do organisms of many species seem to change their behavior toward … Continue reading

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