Effect of the Latent Reservoir on the Evolution of HIV at the Within- and Between-Host Levels
Fig 4
Delay in decline of the founder strain for varying reservoir parameter values in the within-host selection model.
Persistence of the founder strain is defined as the time it takes for the founder strain to decline to a frequency <10% in the within-host population, and the delay in decline was calculated as the difference in persistence between the settings of interest and a control case in which the reservoir was absent. (a) Varying the activation rate a and the relative reservoir size rL in the absence of homeostatic proliferation (ρ = 0, k = rL ∙ a), and (b) varying the homeostatic proliferation rate ρ and the relative reservoir size rL for fixed activation rate (a = 0.01 per day). The homeostatic proliferation rate was varied by tuning the proportion of newly infected cells that enter the reservoir, k. The delay of the within-host dynamics increases with the relative size of the reservoir, and with the activation and homeostatic proliferation rate of latently infected cells. Note that the scales in panel (a) and (b) are different: the delays found in the presence homeostatic proliferation can be much larger than if latently infected cells do not proliferate. Results are shown for strains with increasing replication rates (γ1 = 1.0 - γ16 = 1.05), with the infection founded by strain 9. Similar results were found for the within-host neutral case (S1 Fig).