Diffusion theory for the infection pathway of virus in a living cell

TL;DR

This paper develops a diffusion-based theoretical model to describe how viruses move within living cells, incorporating anomalous diffusion and statistical fluctuation analysis to better understand infection pathways.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized fractional kinetics model for viral diffusion in cells, linking anomalous diffusion properties with infection pathways and statistical fluctuation analysis.

Findings

Virus motion obeys a scaling law.

Anomalous diffusion significantly influences infection pathways.

Statistical fluctuations of diffusion exponents are characterized.

Abstract

The infection pathway of virus in living cell is of interest from the viewpoint of the physics of diffusion. Here, recent developments about a diffusion theory for the infection pathway of an adeno-associated virus in cytoplasm of a living HeLa cell are reported. Generalizing fractional kinetics successfully modeling anomalous diffusion, a theory for describing the infection pathway of the virus over the cytoplasm is presented. The statistical property of the fluctuations of the anomalous-diffusion exponent is also discussed based on a maximum-entropy-principle approach. In addition, an issue regarding the continuum limit of the entropy introduced in the approach is carefully examined. The theory is found to imply that the motion of the virus may obey a scaling law.