Nonlinear disease tolerance curves reveal distinct components of host responses to viral infection.

ABSTRACT: The ability to tolerate infection is a key component of host defence and offers potential novel therapeutic approaches for infectious diseases. To yield successful targets for therapeutic intervention, it is important that the analytical tools employed to measure disease tolerance are able to capture distinct host responses to infection. Here, we show that commonly used methods that estimate tolerance as a linear relationship should be complemented with more flexible, nonlinear estimates of this relationship which may reveal variation in distinct components such as host vigour, sensitivity to increases in pathogen loads, and the severity of the infection. To illustrate this, we measured the survival of Drosophila melanogaster carrying either a functional or non-functional regulator

SUBMITTER: Gupta V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5541558 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature