Stochastic Kinetic Modeling of Viruses

Rishi Srivastava

Viruses are a serious threat to human existence, causing fatal diseases like SARS and AIDS. Understanding how they reproduce and propagate would enable people to design better anti-viral therapies. During the initial phase of viral infection the number of virus particles are sufficiently small. Even during the complete infection cycle certain species always remain at small numbers. These behaviors require stochasticity in modeling approaches. Simulating a complete stochastic model for all the species during infection cycle is computationally very expensive and often intermediate species produced are not required in simulating the subsequent events. Developing analytical and computational tools that would enable us to get the levels of desired species without actually simulating the whole infection cycle is the motivation of the work.