The Evolutionary Dynamics of Covert Infection by Parasites
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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