IAH-funded Studentship: Mathematical modelling of the potential determinants of Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus induced lysis of bovine epithelial cells

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) causes an economically important disease of cloven-hoofed livestock. The virus primarily infects epithelial cells: on the skin around the feet and tongue the virus rapidly replicates, killing the cell and resulting in growing lesions. Eventually the immune response tends to clear the virus from the system and these symptoms gradually disappear. In the soft palate, however, lesions do not occur and the virus can persist inside cells long after the animal has recovered: this has implications for the control of the disease, especially if vaccination is used in an outbreak. An explanation for this bifurcation in behaviour would also contribute to the more general understanding of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). The project aims to explain why such dramatically divergent virus behaviour occurs in fundamentally similar cells. Building on current theoretical work, a spatiallyexplicit mathematical description of epithelial tissue will be developed and the impact on virus dynamics of distinctive components analysed. This will allow likely factors which differentiate these epithelial regions to be investigated individually in a way not necessarily possible experimentally. Hypotheses postulated by the model will then be tested experimentally in-vitro, building on previous work at the Institute which includes the analysis of cytopathology and quantitative studies identifying early stage virus dynamics.

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