This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When a virus mutates, the world usually finds out the hard way. Variants of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 can slip past vaccines and antibody drugs before scientists fully understand what has changed.
A new study from Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (CCB) suggests the hard way may not be inevitable. In a paper published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Eugene Shakhnovich, Roy G. Gordon Professor of Chemistry, and Vaibhav Mohanty, an MD/Ph.D. student at the Harvard Kenneth C.
Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, describes a way to engineer the evolutionary landscape that viruses experience, pushing them away from dangerous variants and into evolutionary dead ends. They call the method fitness landscape design (FLD). "It's basically the inverse of how people usually think about evolution," Mohanty said.
Biologists have long used a fitness landscape metaphor: Each viral sequence is a point on the terrain, and its "height" reflects how well it reproduces and spreads. Evolution is like a population of viruses climbing uphill toward higher fitness. Most research takes that landscape as fixed and asks whether a given mutation will raise or lower a virus's fitness.
Mohanty and Shakhnovich flipped the question: Can we shape the landscape itself by choosing antibody combinations that make most escape routes unviable? "Usually scientists ask, 'If this mutation happens, how will it affect viral replication?'" Mohanty said. "We're asking, 'Can we directly suppress the mutations we're worried about and fence off those paths before they appear?'" That ambition reflects recent frustrations.
The World Health Organization updates flu vaccines twice a year, yet surprise strains still emerge. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has produced a steady stream of subvariants that chip away at vaccine protection. "Viruses are constantly mutating to evade our immune systems," Mohanty said.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
