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A conservation law for virus infection kinetics in vitro
Yusuke Kakizoe1, Satoru Morita2, Shinji Nakaoka3
1Department of Biology, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.
Abstract:
Conservation laws are among the most important properties of a physical system, but are not commonplace in biology. We derived a conservation law from the basic model for viral infections which consists in a small set of ordinary differential equations. We challenged the conservation law experimentally for the case of a virus infection in a cell culture. We found that the derived, conserved quantity remained almost constant throughout the infection period, implying that the derived conservation law holds in this biological system. We also suggest a potential use for the conservation law in evaluating the accuracy of experimental measurements.
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