Emergence of microbial host dormancy during a persistent virus epidemic

Abstract: We study a minimal stochastic individual-based model for a microbial population challenged by a persistent (lytic) virus epidemic. We focus on the situation in which the resident microbial host population and the virus population are in stable coexistence upon arrival of a single new ``mutant'' host individual. We assume that this mutant is capable of switching to a reversible state of dormancy upon contact with virions as a means of avoiding infection by the virus. At the same time, we assume that this new dormancy trait comes with a cost, namely a reduced individual reproduction rate. We prove that there is a non-trivial range of parameters where the mutants can nevertheless invade the resident population with strictly positive probability (bounded away from 0) in the large population limit. Given the reduced reproductive rate, such an invasion would be impossible in the absence of either the dormancy trait or the virus epidemic. We explicitly characterize the parameter regime where this emergence of a (costly) host dormancy trait is possible, determine the success probability of a single invader and the typical amount of time it takes the successful mutants to reach a macroscopic population size. We conclude this study by an investigation of the fate of the population after the successful emergence of a dormancy trait. Heuristic arguments and simulations suggest that after successful invasion, either both host types and the virus will reach coexistence, or the mutants will drive the resident hosts to extinction while the virus will stay in the system.