MSc Public Lecture - Nickolas Goncharenko (Applied Math)

Please contact Audrey Kager for Zoom link. 

Title: Modeling Interactions of Engineered Symbiotic Bacteria and Plasmodium Parasites in Mosquito Midgut

Abstract: The burden of malaria on the human race, especially in developing countries demands the development of novel approaches to fight the spread of Plasmodium sp. parasites which cause malaria, and are transmitted by mosquitoes. One of the most promising is paratransgensis, a technique for eliminating a parasite from a disease vector populations (in this case mosquitoes) through the genetic engineering of a common colonizer of the host. We propose a simple model that can describe many different  examples of paratransgenesis, which we term a Functional Competitive Lotka Volterra (FCLV) system. Our main focus is analyzing FCLV systems with contraction analysis, which we believe has been underused, but has great promise in the area of model analysis. We show that using contraction theory, the analysis of an FCLV model can be reduced to a system of two dimensions less. This allows us to reach the conclusion that  a sufficiently strong genetically modified bacteria, once introduced into a mosquito, can always eliminate Plasmodium sp. within a mosquito.