NEPOTISM IN HONEY BEES, COMPUTER PROGRAMS AND SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESES

Page et al. (1989) attempted to show that bees on queen cells preferentially reared their super sisters as replacement queens rather than half sisters. In support of their contention, they used computer simulation to model the biological system. We argue that the simulation did not accurately reflect the biological system in several important respects. We show that random data will produce the same kinds of statistical significance as the actual data

Gradient Flow Finite Element Discretizations with Energy-Based Adaptivity for the Gross-Pitaevskii Equation

We present an effective adaptive procedure for the numerical approximation of the steady-state Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Our approach is solely based on energy minimization, and consists of a combination of gradient flow iterations and adaptive finite element mesh refinements. Numerical tests show that this strategy is able to provide highly accurate results, with optimal convergence rates with respect to the number of freedom

Perturbed cholesterol and vesicular trafficking associated with dengue blocking in Wolbachia-infected Aedes aegypti cells

Wolbachia are intracellular maternally inherited bacteria that can spread through insect populations and block virus transmission by mosquitoes, providing an important approach to dengue control. To better understand the mechanisms of virus inhibition, we here perform proteomic quantification of the effects of Wolbachia in Aedes aegypti mosquito cells and midgut. Perturbations are observed in vesicular trafficking, lipid metabolism and in the endoplasmic reticulum that could impact viral entry and replication. Wolbachia-infected cells display a differential cholesterol profile, including elevated levels of esterified cholesterol, that is consistent with perturbed intracellular cholesterol trafficking. Cyclodextrins have been shown to reverse lipid accumulation defects in cells with disrupted cholesterol homeostasis. Treatment of Wolbachia-infected Ae. aegypti cells with 2-hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin restores dengue replication in Wolbachia-carrying cells, suggesting dengue is inhibited in Wolbachia-infected cells by localised cholesterol accumulation. These results demonstrate parallels between the cellular Wolbachia viral inhibition phenotype and lipid storage genetic disorders

Optimal simulation-based Bayesian decisions

We present a framework for the efficient computation of optimal Bayesian decisions under intractable likelihoods, by learning a surrogate model for the expected utility (or its distribution) as a function of the action and data spaces. We leverage recent advances in simulation-based inference and Bayesian optimization to develop active learning schemes to choose where in parameter and action spaces to simulate. This allows us to learn the optimal action in as few simulations as possible. The resulting framework is extremely simulation efficient, typically requiring fewer model calls than the associated posterior inference task alone, and a factor of $100-1000$ more efficient than Monte-Carlo based methods. Our framework opens up new capabilities for performing Bayesian decision making, particularly in the previously challenging regime where likelihoods are intractable, and simulations expensive.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure