Ecological and evolutionary dynamics of cell-virus-virophage systems
Fig 6
The time to virus extinction also decreases as a function of the cell number and condition in the simulations. Boxplots of the resulting distributions are shown to the left and the fitted GAMs are shown to the right. For single-celled organisms, virophage inhibition was more effective than PCD, since it led to faster extinction of viruses. The simulations with neutral and inhibitory virophages appear to level-off with increasing cell number, while there was an increase in the time to virus extinction in the PCD simulation from 8- to 16-celled organisms (despite the variance being larger). The three intercepts are significantly different and the smoothing terms statistically significant for the neutral virophages and PCD to the level of p < 10−15. The smoothing term for the simulation with inhibitory virophages was significant to the level of p < 10−5. The normalised root mean squared error (RMSE) is 14.6% and the deviance explained is 69.3%. NV: neutral virophages, IV: inhibitory virophages, PCD: programmed cell-death.