Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Ottino-Loffler B
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5739548 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Ottino-Loffler Bertrand B Scott Jacob G JG Strogatz Steven H SH
eLife 20171221
The incubation period for typhoid, polio, measles, leukemia and many other diseases follows a right-skewed, approximately lognormal distribution. Although this pattern was discovered more than sixty years ago, it remains an open question to explain its ubiquity. Here, we propose an explanation based on evolutionary dynamics on graphs. For simple models of a mutant or pathogen invading a network-structured population of healthy cells, we show that skewed distributions of incubation periods emerge ...[more]