Growth of RB Population in the Conversion Phase of Chlamydia Life Cycle

Abstract Upon infecting a host cell, the reticulate body (RB) form of Chlamydia bacteria simply proliferates by binary fission for an extended period. Available data show only RB units in infected cells 20 hours post infection (hpi), spanning nearly half way through development cycle. With collected every 4 hpi, conversion to elementary (EB) begins abruptly at rapid rate sometime around 24 hpi. By modeling proliferation and as simple birth death processes, it has been shown that optimal strategy maximizing total (mean) EB population cell lysis time is bang-bang control qualitatively replicating observed activities. However, model deviates significant from available on evolution after onset RB-to-EB conversion. working with more refined takes into account small size threshold eligibility requirement noted data, we succeed removing deficiency previous models without affecting strategy.