Virus Infection Pathway in Living Cell: Anomalous Diffusion, Exponent Fluctuations, and Time-Scale Separation

Recent developments about physics of diffusion for the infection pathway of virus in cytoplasm of a living cell are reported. Specifically, the following three issues are discussed based on the experimental fact that the exponent of anomalous diffusion of the virus fluctuates depending on localized areas of the cytoplasm. Firstly, a theoretical framework developed in view of superstatistics offers a generalized fractional kinetics for describing the infection pathway of the virus over the cytoplasm. There, traditional theory of anomalous diffusion is generalized by introducing exponent fluctuations. Then, the framework explicitly takes into account the existence of two largely separated time scales in the infection pathway. Secondly, a statistical distribution of the fluctuations proposed from the experimental data can be derived by the maximum entropy principle. Thirdly, the motion of the virus over the cytoplasm may obey a scaling law. Consequently, a kinetic theory for the infection pathway of the virus in the cytoplasm is established.

Keywords: Anomalous diffusion, Exponent fluctuations, Generalized fractional kinetics, Living cell, Maximum entropy principle, Scaling law, Shannon entropy, Superstatistics, Time-scale separation, Virus infection pathway.