Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
Department of Mathematics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA.
Trends Parasitol. 2023 Aug;39(8):626-637. doi: 10.1016/j.pt.2023.05.006. Epub 2023 Jun 17.
For pathogenic organisms, faster rates of multiplication promote transmission success, the potential to harm hosts, and the evolution of drug resistance. Parasite multiplication rates (PMRs) are often quantified in malaria infections, given the relative ease of sampling. Using modern and historical human infection data, we show that established methods return extraordinarily - and implausibly - large PMRs. We illustrate how inflated PMRs arise from two facets of malaria biology that are far from unique: (i) some developmental ages are easier to sample than others; (ii) the distribution of developmental ages changes over the course of infection. The difficulty of accurately quantifying PMRs demonstrates a need for robust methods and a subsequent re-evaluation of what is known even in the well-studied system of malaria.
对于病原体来说，更快的繁殖速度可以促进传播的成功、对宿主造成潜在的伤害以及耐药性的进化。寄生虫繁殖率 (PMR) 在疟疾感染中经常被量化，因为取样相对容易。利用现代和历史上的人类感染数据，我们表明，既定的方法会产生异常大的 PMR 值，这令人难以置信。我们说明了疟疾生物学的两个方面是如何导致 inflated PMRs 的：（i）有些发育阶段比其他阶段更容易取样；（ii）发育阶段的分布在感染过程中会发生变化。准确量化 PMR 的困难表明需要稳健的方法，以及即使在疟疾这一研究充分的系统中，对已知内容进行后续重新评估的必要性。
