Chaotic signatures in host-microbe interactions.

Is microbial pathogenesis a predictable scientific field? At a time when we are dealing with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) there is intense interest in knowing about the epidemic potential of other microbial threats and new emerging infectious diseases. To know whether microbial pathogenesis will ever be a predictable scientific field requires knowing whether a host-microbe interaction follows deterministic, stochastic, or chaotic dynamics. If randomness and chaos are absent from virulence, there is the hope for prediction in the future regarding the outcome of microbe-host interactions. Chaotic systems are inherently unpredictable although it is possible to generate short-term probabilistic models, as is done in applications of stochastic processes and machine learning to weather forecasting. Information on the dynamics of a system is also essential for understanding the reproducibility of experiments, a topic of great concern in biological sciences. Our study finds preliminary evidence for chaotic dynamics in infectious diseases.