(549b) Quantitative Scaling of Virus One-Step Growth across the Domains of Life

For nearly a century, viruses of fundamental, biomedical, ecological and environmental importance have been studied using laboratory measures of one-step or single-cycle growth. But little effort to date has been directed toward seeking patterns of growth that may hold for most, if not all, viruses. Here, we compiled and analyzed archival data from more than 90 studies of growth across six virus groups (dsDNA, dsRNA, ssDNA, ssRNA(+), ssRNA(-) and ssRNA-RT) infecting a diversity of prokaryotic, eukaryotic and archaeal hosts, representing the domains of life. For hosts spanning from small bacteria to large mammalian cells, yields of virus production (burst sizes) exhibited negligible correlation with host cell size (r² = 0.08). Instead, rise periods of virus production showed modest correlation with cell size (r² = 0.58), where infections of larger host cells had longer periods of virus progeny release. As expected for host cells alone, size correlated with doubling time (r² = 0.65), or larger mammalian cells grow more slowly than smaller host bacteria. Most notably, the latent and rise periods of the virus one-step growth curves showed a relatively strong correlation (r² = 0.82), with near isometric scaling from 10 min to 20000 min (2 weeks). In short, the latent time, prior to the detection of viral progeny, was the same order of magnitude as the rise time, during which viral progeny were released from the host cell. In summary, our analysis of data from a broad diversity of host cells suggests a pattern of growth shared by all viral infections.