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2012 - 11th Annual NC State Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium
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Session Time :
8/1/12 1:30 PM - 8/1/12 2:45 PM
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Content Area : Research Experience for Undergraduate Mathematics: Modeling and Industrial Applied Mathematics
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Lead Student Presenters : Jorly Chatouphonexay
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Co-Presenters :
Breanne Hollie
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Co-Presenters :
Marie Encarnacion
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Abstract Title : Assessing Wolbachia Releases in an Age-Structured Population
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Abstract :
Dengue fever, which affects 50-100 million people each year, is transmitted primarily by the bite of the mosquito, Aedes aegypti. Current measures for controlling Aedes aegypti have had limited success in controlling the disease and are expensive to maintain long-term. Thus, novel control strategies have been proposed. One such strategy involves introducing mosquitoes infected with the bacterium Wolbachia, which reduces the mosquitoes’ ability to spread the virus, due to both lifespan-shortening effects and interference with dengue replication within the mosquito host. Wolbachia is a maternally inherited bacterium whose spread is facilitated by cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI), which causes unviable offspring to be produced when a Wolbachia-infected male mosquito mates with an uninfected female. This leads to infected females producing more viable offspring than uninfected females when infected males are present.
We developed an age-structured population dynamic model, based on a population genetic model developed by Huang et al. (2009), that incorporates density dependence to study the spread of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in a native population. We studied the effectiveness of releases of different age classes (e.g. immatures vs young adults vs older adults), and relate these results to the reproductive values of the age classes. We examine the release threshold to determine the age-specific minimum initial release frequency needed in order to guarantee that Wolbachia invades the native population entirely. We compared and verified the simulations from this model to results obtained from an analogous matrix model.
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Mentor and/or Co-Author : Alun Lewis Lloyd
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