Towards a thermodynamic mechanistic model for the effect of temperature on arthropod vector competence for transmission of arboviruses

Arboviruses such as West Nile virus (WNV), bluetongue virus (BTV), dengue virus (DENV) and chikungunya virus (CHIKV) infect their arthropod vectors over a range of average temperatures depending on the ambient temperature. How the transmission efficiency of an arbovirus (i.e. vector competence) varies with temperature influences not only the short term risk of arbovirus outbreaks in humans and livestock but also the long term impact of climate change on the geographical range of the virus. The strength of the interaction between viral surface (glyco)protein (GP) and the host cell receptor (Cr) on binding of virus to host cell is defined by the thermodynamic dissociation constant K(d_receptor) which is assumed to equal 10(−3) M (at 37 °C) for binding of a sialic acid (SA) on the arthropod midgut epithelial cell surface to a SA-binding site on the surface of BTV, for example. Here virus binding affinity is modelled with increasing number of GP/Cr contacts at temperatures from 10 °C to 35 °C taking into account the change in entropy on immobilization of the whole virus on binding (ΔS(a_immob)). Based on published data, three thermodynamic GP/Cr binding scenarios, namely enthalpy-driven, entropy-assisted and entropy-driven, are shown to affect the temperature sensitivity of virus binding in different ways. Thus for enthalpy-driven GP/Cr binding, viruses bind host cells much more strongly at 10 °C than 35 °C. A mechanistic model is developed for the number of arthropod midgut cells with bound virus and by building in a kinetic component for the rate of arbovirus replication and subsequent spread to the arthropod salivary glands, a model for the effect of temperature on vector competence is developed. The model separates the opposing effects of temperature on midgut cell binding affinity from the kinetic component of virogenesis. It successfully accommodates both increases in vector competence with temperature as for DENV and WNV in mosquitoes and decreases as for the CHIKV 2010–1909 strain in various populations of Aedes albopictus mosquitoes. Enhanced cell binding at lower temperatures through enthalpy-driven GP/Cr binding compensates for the lower replication rate to some degree such that some transmission can still occur at lower temperatures. In contrast, the strength of entropy-driven GP/Cr binding diminishes at low temperatures although there is no minimum temperature threshold for transmission efficiency. The magnitude of ΔS(a_immob) is an important data gap. It is concluded that thermodynamic and kinetic data obtained at the molecular level will prove important in modelling vector competence with temperature.