ArticleNature communications2024
The airborne transmission of viruses causes tight transmission bottlenecks.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- The impact of viral and host factors on the influenza A virus transmission bottleneck.PLoS pathogens · 2026Article
- Viral expansion after transfer is a primary driver of influenza A virus transmission bottlenecks.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Early Warning Signs for Monitoring Airborne Respiratory Virus Transmission.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Review
- The consequences of SARS-CoV-2 within-host persistence.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2025Review
- Barcoded SARS-CoV-2 viruses define the impact of duration and route of exposure on the transmission bottleneck in a hamster model.Science advances · 2025Article
- Barcoded SARS-CoV-2 viruses define the impact of time and route of transmission on the transmission bottleneck in a Syrian hamster model.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- The airborne transmission of viruses causes tight transmission bottlenecks.Nature communications · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The transmission bottleneck describes the number of viral particles that initiate an infection in a new host. Previous studies have used genome sequence data to suggest that transmission bottlenecks for influenza and SARS-CoV-2 involve few viral particles, but the general principles of virus transmission are not fully understood. Here we show that, across a broad range of circumstances, tight transmission bottlenecks are a simple consequence of the physical process of airborne viral transmission. We use mathematical modelling to describe the physical process of the emission and inhalation of infectious particles, deriving the result that that the great majority of transmission bottlenecks involve few viral particles. While exceptions to this rule exist, the circumstances needed to create these exceptions are likely very rare. We thus provide a physical explanation for previous inferences of bottleneck size, while predicting that tight transmission bottlenecks prevail more generally in respiratory virus transmission.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.