Timeline for What makes viruses like the flu and covid so tolerant of mutations compared to most other viruses?
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| Sep 30 at 19:45 | comment | added | bob1 | @BuckThorn in that case the assumption would not be homogeneity - the aerosols will contain virions from the region where they originate. Assume a random population of non-infectious particles from each cell, and I think roughly the same population across cells (people have compared single cell infections in influenza). Some selective differences across the lung though - differences in attachment factors (sialic acids for influenza) in different parts of the lung. Strongly depends on the virus though. Might make a good new question here. | |
| Sep 30 at 19:23 | comment | added | Buck Thorn | Don't mean to keep the comments flowing too long, but what triggered my comment was reading about the mindboggling number of virions that a host might harbor, and the possibility that many if not most of those virions might be defective, as you describe. | |
| Sep 30 at 19:02 | comment | added | bob1 | @BuckThorn I suspect that I'm not enough of a mathematician to understand fully. There are a bunch of virologists working on modeling of transmission in most common species, but I don't remember the specifics from my time in influenza. | |
| Sep 30 at 7:15 | comment | added | Buck Thorn | No, I understand that this is the transmission mechanism. But does it matter if the virions travel together in one aerosol particle, or can they be in multiple? And how closely related (genetically etc) are virions in one particle. Is the original pool in the source uniformly mixed? There are many such interrelated questions. Ultimately the likelihood of virulent transmission becomes the product of the likelihood of the individual events, but you obviously have to know what the individual events might or must be. | |
| Sep 29 at 20:05 | comment | added | bob1 | @BuckThorn I think you might have a bit of a misunderstanding of the transmission problem - the viruses don't transmit as a single virion; the air is too dry for many viruses to survive more than a few seconds, and they are coming from a very wet environment. They transmit in in areosols - tiny (and not so tiny) droplets etc from sneezes, talking and even breathing. Each aerosol will contain some virions, I would guess the number correlates somewhat to aerosol size. | |
| Sep 27 at 7:16 | comment | added | Buck Thorn | It would be interesting to see the solution to the detailed combinatorial problem of transmitting a collection of P infectious particles from a relatively homogeneous (?) pool in the source organism. The number of particles in the source is so huge that it doesn't really matter. What matters is the likelihood of those P particles being emitted and then arriving together at the target. | |
| Apr 18 at 0:00 | history | edited | bob1 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
fixed some typos and for clarity
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| Apr 17 at 7:18 | vote | accept | Mikayla Eckel Cifrese | ||
| Apr 16 at 0:29 | history | answered | bob1 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |