Quantitative analysis of virus trafficking in a biological cell

Virus replication is a complex process that is important to understand. If a virus is to successfully infect a host cell it must travel from the cell wall to the nucleus by hijacking that cell's existing transport system of microtubules. This motion occurs as two iterated steps: passive diffusion through cell cytosol and active transport along microtubule networks. An existing model shows that this process can be approximated as a stochastic differential equation in the limit as the number of microtubules goes to infinity. We propose a different model which reduces the complex viral trajectory to a much simpler finite state Markov process. Preliminary results show this approximation to be superior to the existing model across several modes of comparison.