Jakob Björnberg: A stochastic model for virus reproduction

Viruses are simple parasites that attack individual living cells. In order to reproduce, a virus has two basic choices:
either lay dormant in the host cell and multiply by being copied along with the cell DNA, or burst the host cell and thereby spread to other cells.

I will present a probabilistic model for virus reproduction, based on two branching processes that interact. The purpose is to investigate which strategy is the best from the point of view of the long-term persistence of the viral infection: more dormancy, or more bursts?
Depending on parameters such as the average successfulness of infection attempts, the survival probability of the infection may or may not be monotone in the frequency of bursts.

This is joint work with Britton, Broman and Natan.