No abstract

Parasites can be transmitted vertically and/or horizontally, but the costs or benefits for the host of infection have only been tested after horizontal transmission. Here, we report for the first time, to our knowledge, the survival, reproduction and infection of Aedes aegypti during vertical and horizontal transmission of dengue virus 2 (DENV-2). Females infected horizontally produced more eggs, with a sex ratio skewed towards males, compared with uninfected controls. However, there was no significant difference in the number of emerging adults or in survival of mothers. In contrast, dengueinfected female offspring (vertical transmission) had a shorter lifespan but there were no significant differences in the number of eggs or sex ratio, compared with controls. Finally, the corroboration of infection revealed that virus infected about 11.5% and 8.8% of pools of mothers and of daughters, respectively. These results suggest that the mode of infection and the contact with the virus has no reproductive costs to female mosquitoes, which may explain why both types of transmission are evolutionarily maintained. In addition, we suggest that more attention should be paid to the male contribution to virus dissemination within and among populations and as reservoirs of the infection for human diseases.

No abstract

This paper exposes the research being done about the incorporation of copula functions in supervised classification. It is shown, by means of pixel classification, the advantages that modeling dependencies provides to supervised classification and the benefits of doing it through copula functions which are not limited to linear dependencies. The experiments executed so far, show positive results by having improved the performance of the classifiers that do not have copulas incorporated.