infectable epithelial cells

[stevenhofmeyr]

Not all epicells are infectable. Within the alveoli, only the type II pneumocytes are, and they constitute about 60% of the cells, but are fairly widely spaced. They surround the much bigger type II's and are probably at least 15 microns apart. They are themselves 9 microns across. Within the bronchioles, only the club cells are infectable. We need to reflect that in the model. I think this means that grid points should be 9 or 10 microns apart, because we have no mechanism of representing an epicell spanning multiple grid points. I also think we'll need to have epicells marked as either infectable or invulnerable, because we don't want empty air (null ptrs for epicells) when there are actually cells there, because T cells don't move through empty spaces, so it would block their progress. Presumably we can incorporate these strictures into the structure/network generation code.

[vsurjadidjaja]

One additional thing we may need to consider here is the overall distribution of the type II pneumocytes and the club cells. Do we assume uniform random or some other distribution?