IFNA1 and infection: After calibrating spatial heterogeneity using the Baltes dataset, we next validated IFN–mediated responses using the experiments of Howat et al. [26], who analysed Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV–1) infections in MDBK (IFN–competent) and Vero (IFN–deficient) cells [26, 49, 50, 51, 52].