Explaining the trajectories sick animals take through disease space

Explaining the trajectories sick animals take through disease space. Ideally when you are infected with a pathogen, you get sick and then recover back to your original health. We like to plot the trajectory a sick individual takes through multidimensional disease spaces to better understand how we might nudge this trajectory into a more healthy position. As we’ve begun looking at sick hosts that vary in their responses we find that mice don’t occupy all of the mathematically available space available to them. We think we can explain this by invoking Pareto optimization. There are some hosts that are great at fighting one type of pathogen but not another and the reverse is true. The mice occupy the space between these archetypes. It looks like the mouse phenotypes are contained within a relatively low complexity n-polytope, suggesting there just aren’t that many ways of getting sick. Now our job is to understand the nature of these different types of illness.