Chlamydiae are bacteria with an interesting unusual developmental cycle. A single bacterium in its infectious form (elementary body, EB) enters the host cell, where it converts into its dividing form (reticulate body, RB), and divides by binary fission. Since only the EB form is infectious, before the host cell dies, RBs start to convert into EBs. After the host cell dies RBs do not survive. We model the population growth by a 2-type discrete-time branching process, where the probability of duplication depends on the state. Maximizing the EB production leads to a stochastic optimization problem. Simulation study shows that our novel model is able to reproduce the main features of the development of the population.

翻译：衣原体是一种具有独特且不寻常发育周期的细菌。单个感染性细菌（原体，EB）进入宿主细胞后，会转化为分裂形式（网状体，RB），并通过二分裂方式增殖。由于仅EB形态具有感染性，在宿主细胞死亡前，RB开始转化为EB。宿主细胞死亡后，RB无法存活。我们通过一个两类型离散时间分支过程对种群增长进行建模，其中复制概率取决于当前状态。最大化EB产量构成了一个随机优化问题。模拟研究表明，我们所提出的新模型能够再现该种群发育的主要特征。