The Burst-Size Distribution

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The Burst Size Distribution

In 1939 Ellis and Delbrück obtained values which indicated an exceedingly wide variation of the burst sizes for different bacteriophages. In 1945 Delbrück published the first Burst-Size distribution using an improved technique for bacteriophage T1.

The reported values for the burst size of T7 are in the range x-y, this values are used in many population models for bacteriophage infection [][][].

It is important to have a reliable simulation of the intracellular dynamics in order to generate values for the burst-size. Creating a Burst-Size distribution is one of the most important things of our work since it will be the link between the intracellular scale and the population scale simulations. The BSD is by no means the only distributions generated by our intracellular simulations, distributions for each species in the model are generated indeed.

Simulated BSD

Without defence system our simulated BSD has mean 176 and standard deviation 102. This distribution was created running 1000 simulations of the intracellular model.
We see that experimentally measured values fall within this distribution. The large variance seen by Delbrück and the dispersion in experimental values is congruent with our results (table 1).

BSD using the Defense System

References

Thomas D. Brock. Emergence of Bacterial Genetics, 1990.
Delbrück. Burst Size Distribution in the Growth of Bacterial Viruses(Bacteriophages). 1945 Richard H. Heineman and James J. Bull . Testing Optimality with experimental evolution: Lysis Time in time . 2007
De Paepe et. al. Viruses’ Life History: Towards a Mechanistic Basis of a Trade-Off between Survival and Reproduction among Phage. 2006.
Paul D. Sadowski. Suppression of a Mutation in Gene 3 of Bacteriophage T7 (T7 Endonuclease) by Mutations in Phage and Host Polynucleotide Ligase. 1973

Team:LCG-UNAM-Mexico:BSD

From 2009.igem.org

The Burst-Size Distribution

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