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About the Authors:
Caetano Souto-Maior
Contributed equally to this work with: Caetano Souto-Maior, Gabriel Sylvestre
Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing
* E-mail: [email protected]
Current address: National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America
Affiliation: Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Oeiras, Portugal
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0271-2576
Gabriel Sylvestre
Contributed equally to this work with: Caetano Souto-Maior, Gabriel Sylvestre
Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing
Affiliation: Laboratório de Mosquitos Transmissores de Hematozoários, Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Fernando Braga Stehling Dias
Roles Data curation, Methodology, Resources, Validation, Writing - review & editing
Affiliation: Gabinete da Presidência, Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7747-6136
M. Gabriela M. Gomes
Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Writing - review & editing
Affiliations CIBIO-InBIo, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool, United Kingdom
Rafael Maciel-de-Freitas
Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Writing - review & editing
Affiliations Laboratório de Mosquitos Transmissores de Hematozoários, Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia em Entomologia Molecular (INCT-EM)/CNPq, Rio de Janeiro, BrazilAbstract
Infection is a complex and dynamic process involving a population of invading microbes, the host and its responses, aimed at controlling the situation. Depending on the purpose and level of organization, infection at the organism level can be described by a process as simple as a coin toss, or as complex as a multi-factorial dynamic model; the former, for instance, may be adequate as a component of a population model, while the latter is necessary for a thorough description of the process beginning with a challenge with an infectious inoculum up to establishment or elimination of the pathogen. Experimental readouts in the laboratory are often static, snapshots of the process, assayed under some convenient experimental condition, and therefore cannot comprehensively describe the system. Different from the discrete treatment of infection in population models, or the descriptive summarized accounts of typical lab experiments, in this manuscript, infection is treated as a dynamic process dependent on the...