title: A mathematical model of intrahost pneumococcal pneumonia infection dynamics in murine strains.
abstract: The seriousness of pneumococcal pneumonia in mouse models has been shown to depend both on bacterial serotype and murine strain. We here present a simple ordinary differential equation model of the intrahost immune response to bacterial pneumonia that is capable of capturing diverse experimentally determined responses of various murine strains. We discuss the main causes of such differences while accounting for the uncertainty in the estimation of model parameters. We model the bacterial population in both the lungs and blood, the cellular death caused by the infection, and the activation and immigration of phagocytes to the infected tissue. The ensemble model suggests that inter-strain differences in response to streptococcus pneumonia inoculation reside in the strength of nonspecific immune response and the rate of extrapulmonary phagocytosis.
authors.affiliation: Joint Carnegie Mellon University-University of Pittsburgh, PhD Program in Computational Biology, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. Electronic address: erickamochan@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Ericka
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Mochan
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Swigon
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
authors.forename: G Bard
authors.initials: GB
authors.lastname: Ermentrout
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lukens
authors.affiliation: Department of Critical Care Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA; McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Center for Inflammation and Regenerative Modeling, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
authors.forename: Gilles
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Clermont
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D054884:Host-Pathogen Interactions; D008168:Lung / Q000382:microbiology / Q000473:pathology; D008815:Mice, Inbred Strains; D008954:Models, Biological; D011018:Pneumonia, Pneumococcal / Q000382:microbiology* / Q000473:pathology; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013296:Streptococcus pneumoniae / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Bacterial dynamics; Ensemble modeling; Immune response model; Streptococcus pneumoniae infection