Analysis of Bottlenecks in Experimental Models of Infection

The metaphor of a bottleneck has been used in a variety of fields to describe the critical constraints that limit a system's performance or capacity. In biology, particularly in studies of population dynamics and evolution, the bottleneck concept is often used in reference to events that sharply limit population size Such events frequently produce stochastic changes in the genetic composition of a population (Fig In extreme cases, population-reducing events can eliminate genotypes from a gene pool (Fig