Of mice, macaques and men: scaling of virus dynamics and immune responses
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Mathematical Biology, Microbiology, Virology, Immunology
- Keywords
- allometric scaling, virus dynamics, viral replication, immune escape, cellular immune response, lcmv, siv, hiv, mice, macaques
- Copyright
- © 2015 Althaus
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Of mice, macaques and men: scaling of virus dynamics and immune responses. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e803v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.803v1
Abstract
In this Opinion piece, I argue that the dynamics of viruses and the cellular immune response depend on the body size of the host. I use allometric scaling theory to interpret observed quantitative differences in the infection dynamics of lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) in mice (Mus musculus), simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in humans. However, additional data on the kinetics of virus replication and the dynamics of T cell responses in different host species will be required to shed more light on the question whether the nature of viral infections is affected by the body size of their hosts.
Author Comment
This manuscript was submitted as an Opinion piece to Frontiers in Microbiology on 19th January 2015.