Modeling nutrient and disease dynamics in a plant-pathogen system (Q2160566)

In this paper, concerned primarily with modeling, the authors construct and investigate two mathematical models that incorporate nutrient (nitrogen and phosphorus) effects into the dynamics of a within-host plant-pathogen interaction. The first model considers nutrient-limited virus production in order to account for resource-limited growth, while the second one considers nutrient-induced viral production delay in order to account for the time it takes for the virus to be produced inside the host cells and to test the hypothesis that temporal changes in the virus titer can be explained by a delay in the viral reproduction. The model with nutrient-limited virus production is constructed, after a careful analysis of all its biological subsystems, as a 5-dimensional system of ODEs which, after assuming that the nutrient is constant, can be reduced to a 4-dimensional model, a standard incidence rate of infection being employed. The virus reproduction number is then computed after finding first the average number of virions produced per individual per timestep and the average lifetime of a virion. It is then determined that the said virus reproduction number is a sharp threshold as far as the stability of the disease-free equilibrium is concerned. The model with delay in virus production is constructed as a 3-dimensional system of ODEs featuring a constant delay in the (standard incidence) virus production term, the stability of the disease-free equilibrium being again of concern, via an approach involving the eigenvalues of the Jacobian. Numerical simulations are then performed in order to gain further insight into the mechanisms that increase the value of the virus reproduction number and improve the parameter fit.