
Bacterial growth: a statistical physicist's guide - mindcrime
https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04435
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leemailll
I know nothing about the two authors of this paper, but when talking about
statistics and physics, the first two names coming to my mind are Delbrück and
Luria, founding fathers of molecular biology and had a physics background.
Also Luria's A Slot Machine, a Broken Test Tube is a joyful autobiography
about his journey into science.

~~~
contravariant
When talking about statistical physics you should really be thinking more
along the lines of Boltzmann, Carnot and Helmholtz.

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nkurz
_Consider the following scenario: a small number of pathogenic bacteria
(perhaps 10-100) enter the human body and cause an infection._

This might be a naive question, but why do we want to assume that more than
one bacteria was initially introduced? Is it just to increase the chances that
at least one will find a suitable habitat and begin to reproduce, or is there
actually some sort of group effect happening, whereby a larger initial
concentration increases the chances of infection more than random chance would
imply?

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nonbel
It seems unlikely to come into contact with only a single cell... although a
strange thing about HIV is that it seems only a single viral particle usually
gets transmitted from one person to another. Even though there are millions of
variants in each infected person only a single one is usually passed on:

> _" The reverse transcriptase of HIV lacks proofreading activity, the ability
> to confirm that the DNA transcript it makes is an accurate copy of the RNA
> code, and confers a mutation rate of approximately 3.4×10−5 mutations per
> base pair per replication cycle. Since the HIV genome is an estimated 104
> base pairs in length and the baseline rate of viral production is
> approximately 1010 virions per day, millions of viral variants are produced
> within any infected person in a single day."_
> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2614444/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2614444/)

> _" Transmission of a single viral variant occurs in about 76–90% of cases of
> heterosexual transmission [2], [6], [7], in about 60% of cases of
> HIV-1-infected men who have sex with men (MSM) [5], and only in about 40% of
> injection drug users (IDU) who acquired HIV-1 infection [4]."_
> [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016714)

