The Evolutionary Dynamics of Covert Infection by Parasites

Ian Sorrell
(The University of Sheffield)

07/05/30, 13:00 (理学部3号館6階数理生物学セミナー室)


It is clear that infectious organisms show substantial variety in their life-histories with a wide range of transmission strategies, beyond the basic horizontal and vertical (parent to offspring) transmission. There is now an increasing awareness that parasites may produce ‘silent’/’covert’ infections that cause minimal if any impact on their hosts, are not horizontally infectious but may revert to becoming so or passed vertically to the next generations. Covert infections have been particularly well studied in insect baculovirus interactions where it has long been postulated that they produce hidden or covert infections, and persist within their insect hosts without the display of obvious disease symptoms. A key feature of this process is that a proportion of horizontal infections lead to these silent rather than infectious overt individuals. Understanding the evolutionary dynamics of these silent infections is important because they may provide a mechanism for the persistence of many diseases. The question remains, when is covert infection favoured? Here we examine the evolution of covert infection using evolutionary game theory that explicitly models the host parasite ecological dynamics. Our objective is to begin to determine under what conditions should covert behaviour evolve.


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