Related papers: Codon Bias and Mutability in HIV Sequences
In this letter we study the full semi-conservative treatment of a model for the co-evolution of a virus and an adaptive immune system. Regions of viability are calculated for both conservatively and semi-conservatively replicating viruses…
Preliminary epidemiologic, phylogenetic and clinical findings suggest that several novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants have increased transmissibility and decreased efficacy of several existing…
The nucleotide composition of human genes with a special emphasis on transcription-related strand asymmetries is analyzed. Such asymmetries may be associated with different mutational rates in two principal factors. The first one is…
The human genome encodes a family of editing enzymes known as APOBEC3 (apolipoprotein B mRNA editing enzyme, catalytic polypeptide-like 3). Several family members, such as APO-BEC3G, APOBEC3F, and APOBEC3H haplotype II, exhibit activity…
Certain retroviruses, including HIV, insert their DNA in a non-random fraction of the host genome via poorly understood selection mechanisms. Here, we develop a biophysical model for retroviral integrations as stochastic and…
In early HIV infection, the virus population escapes from multiple CD8+ cell responses. The later an escape mutation emerges, the slower it outgrows its competition, i. e. the escape rate is lower. This pattern could indicate that the…
Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) evolves with extraordinary rapidity. However, its evolution is constrained by interactions between mutations in its fitness landscape. Here we show that an Ising model describing these interactions,…
Motivation: HIV is difficult to treat because its virus mutates at a high rate and mutated viruses easily develop resistance to existing drugs. If the relationships between mutations and drug resistances can be determined from historical…
Many modified genetic codes are found in specific genomes in which one or more codons have been reassigned to a different amino acid from that in the canonical code. We present a model that unifies four possible mechanisms for reassignment,…
Due to the low density of envelope (Env) spikes on the surface of HIV-1, neutralizing IgG antibodies rarely bind bivalently using both antigen-binding arms (Fabs) to crosslink between spikes (inter-spike crosslinking), instead resorting to…
This paper describes a novel approach to modeling homphily, i.e. the tendency of nodes that share (or differ in) certain attributes to be linked; we consider dynamic networks in which nodes can be added over time but not removed. Our…
An exactly solvable model based on the topology of a protein native state is applied to identify bottlenecks and key-sites for the folding of HIV-1 Protease. The predicted sites are found to correlate well with clinical data on resistance…
Many microbial populations rapidly adapt to changing environments with multiple variants competing for survival. To quantify such complex evolutionary dynamics in vivo, time resolved and genome wide data including rare variants are…
The rank ordered distribution of the codon usage frequencies for 123 bacteriae is best fitted by a three parameters function that is the sum of a constant, an exponential and a linear term in the rank n. The parameters depend (two…
Mutation rates and fitness costs of deleterious mutations are difficult to measure in vivo but essential for a quantitative understanding of evolution. Using whole genome deep sequencing data from longitudinal samples during untreated HIV-1…
HIV-1 protease represents an appealing system for directed enzyme re-design, since it has various different endogenous targets, a relatively simple structure and it is well studied. Recently Chaudhury and Gray (Structure (2009) 17: 1636 --…
The role of positive selection in human evolution remains controversial. On the one hand, scans for positive selection have identified hundreds of candidate loci and the genome-wide patterns of polymorphism show signatures consistent with…
Most amino acids are encoded by multiple synonymous codons. For an amino acid, some of its synonymous codons are used much more rarely than others. Analyses of positions of such rare codons in protein sequences revealed that rare codons can…
Models of codon evolution are commonly used to identify positive selection. Positive selection is typically a heterogeneous process, i.e., it acts on some branches of the evolutionary tree and not others. Previous work on DNA models showed…
Motivation: Proteins are known to undergo conformational changes in the course of their functions. The changes in conformation are often attributable to a small fraction of residues within the protein. Therefore identification of these…