Related papers: Eco-evolutionary dynamics of adapting pathogens an…
Antigenic variation is the main immune escape mechanism for RNA viruses like influenza or SARS-CoV-2. While high mutation rates promote antigenic escape, they also induce large mutational loads and reduced fitness. It remains unclear how…
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…
Viruses like influenza have long coevolved with host immune systems, gradually shaping the evolutionary trajectory of these pathogens. Host immune systems develop immunity against circulating strains, which in turn avoid extinction by…
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…
Between pandemics, the influenza virus exhibits periods of incremental evolution via a process known as antigenic drift. This process gives rise to a sequence of strains of the pathogen that are continuously replaced by newer strains,…
The evolutionary dynamics of human Influenza A virus presents a challenging theoretical problem. An extremely high mutation rate allows the virus to escape, at each epidemic season, the host immune protection elicited by previous…
In this paper we study intra-host viral adaptation by antigenic cooperation - a mechanism of immune escape that serves as an alternative to the standard mechanism of escape by continuous genomic diversification and allows to explain a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Rapidly evolving viruses use antigenic drift as a key mechanism to evade host immunity and persist in real populations. While traditional models of antigenic drift and epidemic spread rely on low-dimensional antigenic spaces, genomic…
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…
Population dynamics and evolutionary genetics underly the structure of ecosystems, changing on the same timescale for interacting species with rapid turnover, such as virus (e.g. HIV) and immune response. Thus, an important problem in…
The seasonal human influenza virus undergoes rapid evolution, leading to significant changes in circulating viral strains from year to year. These changes are typically driven by adaptive mutations, particularly in the antigenic epitopes,…
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…
Rapidly evolving pathogens like influenza viruses can persist by accumulating antigenic novelty fast enough to evade the adaptive immunity of the host population, yet without continuous accumulation of genetic diversity. This dynamical…