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Elife . Antigenic evolution of human influenza H3N2 neuraminidase is constrained by charge balancing

tetano

Editor, Senior Moderator
Elife


. 2021 Dec 8;10:e72516.
doi: 10.7554/eLife.72516. Online ahead of print.
Antigenic evolution of human influenza H3N2 neuraminidase is constrained by charge balancing


Yiquan Wang[SUP] 1 [/SUP], Ruipeng Lei[SUP] 1 [/SUP], Armita Nourmohammad[SUP] 2 [/SUP], Nicholas C Wu[SUP] 1 [/SUP]



Affiliations

Abstract

As one of the main influenza antigens, neuraminidase (NA) in H3N2 virus has evolved extensively for more than 50 years due to continuous immune pressure. While NA has recently emerged as an effective vaccine target, biophysical constraints on the antigenic evolution of NA remain largely elusive. Here, we apply combinatorial mutagenesis and next-generation sequencing to characterize the local fitness landscape in an antigenic region of NA in six different human H3N2 strains that were isolated around 10 years apart. The local fitness landscape correlates well among strains and the pairwise epistasis is highly conserved. Our analysis further demonstrates that local net charge governs the pairwise epistasis in this antigenic region. In addition, we show that residue coevolution in this antigenic region is correlated with the pairwise epistasis between charge states. Overall, this study demonstrates the importance of quantifying epistasis and the underlying biophysical constraint for building a model of influenza evolution.

Keywords: evolutionary biology; infectious disease; microbiology.
 
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