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Evolutionary dynamics of incubation periods
The incubation period for typhoid, polio, measles, leukemia and many other diseases follows a right-skewed, approximately lognormal distribution. Although this pattern was discovered more than sixty years ago, it remains an open question to explain its ubiquity. Here, we propose an explanation based...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5739548/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29266000 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.30212 |
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author | Ottino-Loffler, Bertrand Scott, Jacob G Strogatz, Steven H |
author_facet | Ottino-Loffler, Bertrand Scott, Jacob G Strogatz, Steven H |
author_sort | Ottino-Loffler, Bertrand |
collection | PubMed |
description | The incubation period for typhoid, polio, measles, leukemia and many other diseases follows a right-skewed, approximately lognormal distribution. Although this pattern was discovered more than sixty years ago, it remains an open question to explain its ubiquity. Here, we propose an explanation based on evolutionary dynamics on graphs. For simple models of a mutant or pathogen invading a network-structured population of healthy cells, we show that skewed distributions of incubation periods emerge for a wide range of assumptions about invader fitness, competition dynamics, and network structure. The skewness stems from stochastic mechanisms associated with two classic problems in probability theory: the coupon collector and the random walk. Unlike previous explanations that rely crucially on heterogeneity, our results hold even for homogeneous populations. Thus, we predict that two equally healthy individuals subjected to equal doses of equally pathogenic agents may, by chance alone, show remarkably different time courses of disease. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5739548 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-57395482017-12-22 Evolutionary dynamics of incubation periods Ottino-Loffler, Bertrand Scott, Jacob G Strogatz, Steven H eLife Computational and Systems Biology The incubation period for typhoid, polio, measles, leukemia and many other diseases follows a right-skewed, approximately lognormal distribution. Although this pattern was discovered more than sixty years ago, it remains an open question to explain its ubiquity. Here, we propose an explanation based on evolutionary dynamics on graphs. For simple models of a mutant or pathogen invading a network-structured population of healthy cells, we show that skewed distributions of incubation periods emerge for a wide range of assumptions about invader fitness, competition dynamics, and network structure. The skewness stems from stochastic mechanisms associated with two classic problems in probability theory: the coupon collector and the random walk. Unlike previous explanations that rely crucially on heterogeneity, our results hold even for homogeneous populations. Thus, we predict that two equally healthy individuals subjected to equal doses of equally pathogenic agents may, by chance alone, show remarkably different time courses of disease. eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2017-12-21 /pmc/articles/PMC5739548/ /pubmed/29266000 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.30212 Text en © 2017, Ottino-Loffler et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Computational and Systems Biology Ottino-Loffler, Bertrand Scott, Jacob G Strogatz, Steven H Evolutionary dynamics of incubation periods |
title | Evolutionary dynamics of incubation periods |
title_full | Evolutionary dynamics of incubation periods |
title_fullStr | Evolutionary dynamics of incubation periods |
title_full_unstemmed | Evolutionary dynamics of incubation periods |
title_short | Evolutionary dynamics of incubation periods |
title_sort | evolutionary dynamics of incubation periods |
topic | Computational and Systems Biology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5739548/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29266000 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.30212 |
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