Direct contact and environmental contaminations are responsible for HEV transmission in pigs.

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) can cause enterically-transmitted hepatitis in humans. The zoonotic nature of Hepatitis E infections has been established in industrialized areas and domestic pigs are considered as the main reservoir. The dynamics of transmission in pig herds therefore needs to be understood to reduce the prevalence of viremic pigs at slaughter and prevent contaminated pig products from entering the food chain.

Biological and mathematical modeling of melanocyte development.

We aim to evaluate environmental and genetic effects on the expansion/proliferation of committed single cells during embryonic development, using melanoblasts as a paradigm to model this phenomenon. Melanoblasts are a specific type of cell that display extensive cellular proliferation during development. However, the events controlling melanoblast expansion are still poorly understood due to insufficient knowledge concerning their number and distribution in the various skin compartments.

Melanoblast proliferation dynamics during mouse embryonic development. Modeling and validation.

In this paper, we are looking for mathematical modeling of mouse embryonic melanoblast proliferation dynamics, taking into account, the expression level of β-catenin. This protein plays an important role into the whole signal pathway process. Different assumptions on some unobservable features lead to different candidate models.