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Paper   IPM / Biological / 15737
School of Biological Sciences
  Title:   Modeling the probability distribution of the bacterial burst size via a game-theoretic approach
  Author(s): 
1.  Seyed Amir Malekpour
2.  Parsa Pakzad
3.  Mohammad-Hadi Foroughmand-Araabi
4.  Sama Goliaei
5.  Ruzbeh Tusserkani
6.  Bahram Goliaei
7.  Mehdi Sadeghi
  Status:   Published
  Journal: Journal of bioinformatics and computational biology
  No.:  4
  Vol.:  16
  Year:  2018
  Pages:   https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219720018500129
  Supported by:  IPM
  Abstract:
Based on previous studies, empirical distribution of the bacterial burst size varies even in a population of isogenic bacteria. Since bacteriophage progenies increase linearly with time, it is the lysis time variation that results in the bacterial burst size variations.
Here, the burst size variation is computationally modeled by considering the lysis time decisions as a game. Each player in the game is a bacteriophage that has initially infected and lysed its host bacterium. Also, the payoff of each burst size strategy is the average number of bacteria that are solely infected by the bacteriophage progenies after lysis. For calculating the payoffs, a new version of ball and bin model with time dependent occupation probabilities (TDOP) is proposed.
We show that Nash equilibrium occurs for a range of mixed burst size strategies that are chosen and played by bacteriophages, stochastically. Moreover, it is concluded that the burst size variations arise from choosing mixed lysis strategies by each player. By choosing the lysis time and also the burst size stochastically, the released bacteriophage progenies infect a portion of host bacteria in environment and avoid extinction. The probability distribution of the mixed burst size strategies is also identified.
Received 8 December 2017 Revised 25 March 2018 Accepted 1 April 2018 Published: 26 July 2018

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