Evolution of malaria virulence in cross-generation transmission through selective immune pressure

Theoretical arguments and some mathematical models of host-parasite coevolution (e.g. [16]) suggest host immunity as the driving source for the evolution of parasite virulence. Imperfect vaccines in particular, can play the role and recent work [7] sets to test these ideas experimentally, using the mouse malaria model, Plasmodium chabaudi. To this end the authors evolve parasite lines in immunized and nonimmunized (“naïve”) mice using serial passage of infected blood samples. They find parasite lines evolved in immunized mice become more virulent than those evolved in naive mice. Furthermore, this feature persisted even when the evolved strains were transmitted through mosquitoes. Here we develop a mathematical model of parasite dynamics that qualitatively reproduces the experimental results of [7]. Our model accounts for the basic in-host processes: (i) production and depletion of red blood cells (RBC); (ii) immune-modulated parasite growth/ replication, (iii) immune stimulation and clearing of parasite. Besides we introduce multiple parasite strains with variable levels of virulence, and allow random mutations during replication process. The virulence is represented by a single parameter – immune stimulation threshold. So more virulent strains have higher “tolerance levels”, hence increased RBC depletion (anemia). Numeric simulations with our model exhibit, as in [7] the overall evolution of virulence in serial passage of parasite strains, and its enhancement through partial (imperfect) immunization. N at ur e P re ce di ng s : h dl :1 01 01 /n pr e. 20 07 .2 03 .1 : P os te d 23 J un 2 00 7