Related papers: A quantitative theory of viral-immune coevolution …
The evolution of many microbes and pathogens, including circulating viruses such as seasonal influenza, is driven by immune pressure from the host population. In turn, the immune systems of infected populations get updated, chasing viruses…
The vertebrate adaptive immune system provides a flexible and diverse set of molecules to neutralize pathogens. Yet, viruses such as HIV can cause chronic infections by evolving as quickly as the adaptive immune system, forming an…
We introduce and analyze a within-host dynamical model of the coevolution between rapidly mutating pathogens and the adaptive immune response. Pathogen mutation and a homeostatic constraint on lymphocytes both play a role in allowing the…
The adaptive immune system engages in an arms race with evolving viruses, trying to generate new responses to viral strains that continually move away from the set of variants that have already elicited a functional immune response. In…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…
As pathogens spread in a population of hosts, immunity is built up and the pool of susceptible individuals is depleted. This generates selective pressure, to which many human RNA viruses, such as influenza virus or SARS-CoV-2, respond with…
The adaptive immune system is a dynamical, self-organized multiscale system that protects vertebrates from both pathogens and internal irregularities, such as tumours. For these reason it fascinates physicists, yet the multitude of…
Several pathogens use evolvability as a survival strategy against acquired immunity of the host. Despite their high variability in time, some of them exhibit quite low variability within the population at any given time, a somehow…
We study an abstract model for the co-evolution between mutating viruses and the adaptive immune system. In sequence space, these two populations are localized around transiently dominant strains. Delocalization or error thresholds exhibit…
Organisms have evolved immune systems that can counter pathogenic threats. The adaptive immune system in vertebrates consists of a diverse repertoire of immune receptors that can dynamically reorganize to specifically target the…
We propose a physical theory underlying the temporal evolution of competing virus variants that relies on the existence of (quasi) fixed points capturing the large time scale invariance of the dynamics. To motivate our result we first…
The spread of infectious disease and the evolution of antigenically distinct strains are often modeled separately, despite strong feedbacks mediated by host immune memory and heterogeneous contacts. To tackle this challenging problem, we…
Antigenic escape constitutes the main mechanism allowing rapidly evolving viruses to achieve endemicity. Beyond granting immune escape, empirical evidence also suggests that mutations of viruses might increase their inter-host…
Viruses evolve in the background of host immune systems that exert selective pressure and drive viral evolutionary trajectories. This interaction leads to different evolutionary patterns in antigenic space. Examples observed in nature…
Based on a recent model of evolving viruses competing with an adapting immune system [1], we study the conditions under which a viral quasispecies can maximize its growth rate. The range of mutation rates that allows viruses to thrive is…
The immune system recognizes a myriad of invading pathogens and their toxic products. It does so with a finite repertoire of antibodies and T cell receptors. We here describe theories that quantify the immune system dynamics. We describe…
Cooperation and competition between pathogens can alter the amount of individuals affected by a co-infection. Nonetheless, the evolution of the pathogens' behavior has been overlooked. Here, we consider a co-evolutionary model where the…
One strategy for winning a coevolutionary struggle is to evolve rapidly. Most of the literature on host-pathogen coevolution focuses on this phenomenon, and looks for consequent evidence of coevolutionary arms races. An alternative…
The emergence or adaptation of pathogens may lead to epidemics, highlighting the need for a thorough understanding of pathogen evolution. The tradeoff hypothesis suggests that virulence evolves to reach an optimal transmission intensity…