Seven challenges in modeling pathogen dynamics within-host and across scales

Abstract

The population dynamics of infectious disease is a mature field in terms of theory and to some extent, application. However for microparasites, the theory and application of models of the dynamics within a single infected host is still an open field. Further, connecting across the scales – from cellular to host level, to population level – has potential to vastly improve our understanding of pathogen dynamics and evolution. Here, we highlight seven challenges in the following areas: transmission bottlenecks, heterogeneity within host, dynamic fitness landscapes within hosts, making use of next-generation sequencing data, capturing superinfection and when and how to model more than two scales.

Keywords

• Within-host
• Multiple scales
• Superinfection
• Transmission bottlenecks
• Deep-sequencing