Here, I studied whether hosts' induced defenses mediate dynamics of multiple infection of the fungal pathogen, Podosphaera plantaginis, infecting Plantago lanceolata.
Although these differences raise questions regarding whether the commercially available original Huh7 cells (Huh7-RRB) should be adopted as some type of "standard" in the field, the comparison of HCVcc infection dynamics in multiple Huh7 cell lines also clearly can provide insight into the viral-host interactions required for infection.
The ability of a parasite strain to establish and grow on its host may be drastically altered by simultaneous infection by other parasite strains, and dynamics under multiple infection have been suggested to be a major force driving pathogen evolution.
Previous modeling [ 32] suggests that under cell-to-cell transmission and in the context of spatially restricted virus spread, multiple infection can significantly drive the dynamics even at the lowest virus loads, which could influence the results.
This disease therefore provides an opportunity to study the dynamics of multiple infection and inter-specific competition without a confounding effect of the pathogens being specialized to different host species.
Much more experimental work is needed to understand whether the outcome is mediated by abiotic conditions or through a response to repeated attack, but these results demonstrate how variable and context dependent the dynamics of multiple infection may be.
Preliminary experiments have used a Plasmodium chabaudi rodent malaria model, previously used to study aspects of mixed genotype infections, such as the dynamics of multiple infection, 25 within-host competition in genetically diverse infections, 26 and competitive release of drug resistance on drug treatment in mixed infections.
This ability to coordinate the development of resistance when it is needed has been verified for numerous plant species (Heil and Baldwin 2002), which suggests that inducible resistance may play an important role in determining how dynamics of multiple infection are played out in plants.
Predictions generated by an epidemiological model on the within-population spread of Po. plantaginis have demonstrated such discrepancy with respect to real data (Ovaskainen and Laine 2006), and in part, this may be the result of spatially variable dynamics of multiple infection.
These results are in line with earlier studies of multiple infection, showing that multiple infection is an important determinant of infection dynamics within a single host and that under conditions of multiple infection, the success of a strain cannot be predicted from its performance when alone (Nakamura et al. 1992; Thomas et al. 2003; Hodgson et al. 2004; de Roode et al. 2005).
