Viruses are the most abundant replicating entities on Earth, with an estimated 1030 virus particles in Earth's oceans alone (Suttle, 2005). Viruses play an important role in the marine carbon cycle, by viral mortality effects on the food web and by the `viral shunt' of material from higher to lower trophic levels (Fuhrman, 1999). Understanding the ecological and evolutionary interactions betwee...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) can replicate within hepatocytes without causing direct cell damage. The host immune response is, therefore, not only essential to control the spread of virus infection, but it is also responsible for the inflammatory events causing liver pathologies. In this review, we discuss how HBV deals with host immunity and how we can harness it to achieve virus control and suppre...

The associations between pathogens and their hosts are complex and can result from a variety of evolutionary processes including codivergence, lateral transfer, or duplication. Papillomaviruses (PVs) are double-stranded DNA viruses ubiquitously present in mammals and are a suitable target for rigorous statistical tests of potential virus-host codivergence. We analyze the evolutionary dynamics o...

In this study, we model the interaction among antibody, virus, host cell, immune cell and normal cell as random collisions, because antibody and virus are unlikely to have efficient driving systems. Then we use the model II of waiting times to analyze the collision between antibody and virus with a certain number of normal cells, and use the Monte-Carlo simulation to analyze the random collisio...

Host-to-host transmission--a key step in plant virus infection cycles--is ensured predominantly by vectors, especially aphids and related insects. A deeper understanding of the mechanisms of virus acquisition, which is critical to vector-transmission, might help to design future virus control strategies, because any newly discovered molecular or cellular process is a potential target for hamper...

Viral infections involve a complex interplay of the immune response and escape mutation of the virus quasispecies inside a single host. Although fundamental aspects of such a balance of mutation and selection pressure have been established by the quasispecies theory decades ago, its implications have largely remained qualitative. Here, we present a quantitative approach to model the virus evolu...

Bats are natural reservoirs of rabies. We address the maintenance of the disease in bat colonies by developing individual and population models that generate indicators of risk of rabies to bats, that provide dynamic estimates of effects of rabies on population densities, and that suggest consequences of viral exposures and infections in bats relative to physiological and ecological characteris...

Coinfection of hosts with more than one microorganism is ubiquitous in natural systems, but its ef ects are not simple. Upon coinfection with multiple parasites (def ned here as infectious organisms that cause harm to their hosts), a range of within-host outcomes may occur, including host pathological changes and immune responses as well as ef ects on the individual parasites (Fig. 1). Some out...

Virus particles (virions) often contain not only virus-encoded but also host-encoded proteins. Some of these host proteins are enclosed within the virion structure, while others, in the case of enveloped viruses, are embedded in the host-derived membrane. While many of these host protein incorporations are likely accidental, some may play a role in virus infectivity, replication and/or immunore...