Modeling Shrimp Biomass and Viral Infection for Production of Biological Countermeasures

Dr. Shuhua Hu

Center for Research in Scientific Computation
North Carolina State Universtiy

February 28, 2008
219 Shelby Center
8:30 AM (Refreshments at 8:00)

Abstract

A hybrid model of shrimp biomass and vaccine production system was developed for the production of large quantities of biological countermeasures, where the output of biomass production model for the healthy shrimp is served as input to the vaccine production model for shrimp that have been infected with a recombinant viral vector expressing a foreign antigen. The biomass production model has size as the only structure variable, and the vaccine production model entails both size and class age structure. Sensitivity of size-structured population model with respect to growth and mortality rates is one important factor in optimizing the entire biomass production system. A rigorous derivation of the partial differential equations for the sensitivities of the population density with respect to initial conditions, growth, mortality and fecundity rates was established via the method of characteristics. A reassuring aspect of our investigations is that they reveal that the correct sensitivity equations can be formally obtained by simply differentiating the population equation of interest with respect to the interested functions.