A conservation law and an intracellular delay for viral infection dynamics in cell culture

      The conservation laws can be seen mainly in physics such as the conservation of mass-energy and of linear momentum. However, they are not commonplace in biology. In our study, we derived a conservation law from the most basic model for viral infection that consists in a small set of ordinary differential equation. Then we confirmed the derived, conserved quantity remained almost constant during the viral infection experiments in cell culture. Furthermore, we introduced a mathematical framework including an intracellular delay that was defined as “eclipse phase”. Then we investigated the duration and distribution of the eclipse phase for the infection of HSC-F cells with the virulent SHIV-KS661. We found that the eclipse phase of SHIV-KS661 lasts on average one day and is consistent with an Erlang distribution.