The impact of immune cell interactions on virus quasi-species formation

The process of viral infection spreading in tissues was influenced by various factors, including virus replication within host cells, transportation, and the immune response. Reaction-diffusion systems provided a suitable framework for examining this process. In this work, we studied a nonlocal reaction-diffusion system of equations that modeled the distribution of viruses based on their genotypes and their interaction with the immune response. It was shown that the infection may persist at a certain level alongside a chronic immune response, exhibiting spatially uniform or oscillatory behavior. Finally, the immune cells may become entirely depleted, leading to a high viral load persisting in the tissue. Numerical simulations were employed to elucidate the nonlinear dynamics and pattern formation inherent in the nonlocal model. © 2024 the Author(s)