Attenuation of HIV severity by slightly deleterious mutations can explain the long-term trajectory of virulence evolution
Fig 4
Between-host outcomes at equilibrium for an increasingly heterogenous host population.
Histograms of spVLs in heterogenous infected population for different maximum host effect size, e, for 250 segregating sites. To account for the effect that host genetics has on viral load, we introduced a host specific additive effect to viral load. The size of the host effect is discretely uniformly distributed between -e and e and there are 50 host types. A maximum effect size of e = 0.1 (A) results in a small increase in the range of viral loads observed, and as we increase e we observe a more realistic distribution of viral loads. Increasing the effect size towards e = 1 further flattens and skews the distribution. Corresponding results for other choices of m are present in supp. Fig 4.