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. 2018 Jan 29;9:418. doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-02660-4

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — Sources of robustness in biological systems. The three main sources of phenotypic robustness in biological systems with respect to internal or environmental perturbations are: versatility, functional redundancy (genetic and pathway redundancy), and the system control. The virulence functions (virulence phenotypes) can be seen as a mechanism to modify the host environment to make it beneficial for the growth of the pathogen