Cohabitation reaction-diffusion model for virus focal infections

Abstract

The propagation of virus infection fronts has been typically modeled using a set of classical (noncohabitation) reaction-diffusion equations for interacting species. However, for some single-species systems it has been recently shown that noncohabitation reaction-diffusion equations may lead to unrealistic descriptions. We argue that previous virus infection models also have this limitation, because they assume that a virion can simultaneously reproduce inside a cell and diffuse away from it. For this reason, we build a several-species cohabitation model that does not have this limitation. Furthermore, we perform a sensitivity analysis for the most relevant parameters of the model, and we compare the predicted infection speed with observed data for two different strains of the T7 virus