Browsing by Author "Seoighe, Cathal"

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    Frequent toggling between alternative amino acids Is driven by selection in HIV-1
    (Public Library of Science, 2008) Delport, Wayne; Scheffler, Konrad; Seoighe, Cathal
    Host immune responses against infectious pathogens exert strong selective pressures favouring the emergence of escape mutations that prevent immune recognition. Escape mutations within or flanking functionally conserved epitopes can occur at a significant cost to the pathogen in terms of its ability to replicate effectively. Such mutations come under selective pressure to revert to the wild type in hosts that do not mount an immune response against the epitope. Amino acid positions exhibiting this pattern of escape and reversion are of interest because they tend to coincide with immune responses that control pathogen replication effectively. We have used a probabilistic model of protein coding sequence evolution to detect sites in HIV-1 exhibiting a pattern of rapid escape and reversion. Our model is designed to detect sites that toggle between a wild type amino acid, which is susceptible to a specific immune response, and amino acids with lower replicative fitness that evade immune recognition. Through simulation, we show that this model has significantly greater power to detect selection involving immune escape and reversion than standard models of diversifying selection, which are sensitive to an overall increased rate of non-synonymous substitution. Applied to alignments of HIV-1 protein coding sequences, the model of immune escape and reversion detects a significantly greater number of adaptively evolving sites in env and nef. In all genes tested, the model provides a significantly better description of adaptively evolving sites than standard models of diversifying selection. Several of the sites detected are corroborated by association between Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) and viral sequence polymorphisms. Overall, there is evidence for a large number of sites in HIV-1 evolving under strong selective pressure, but exhibiting low sequence diversity. A phylogenetic model designed to detect rapid toggling between wild type and escape amino acids identifies a larger number of adaptively evolving sites in HIV-1, and can in some cases correctly identify the amino acid that is susceptible to the immune response.
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    Identification of broadly neutralizing antibody epitopes in the HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein using evolutionary models
    (BioMed Central, 2013-12-02) Lacerda, Miguel; Moore, Penny L.; Ngandu, Nobubelo K.; Seaman, Michael; Gray, Elin S.; Murrell, Ben; Krishnamoorthy, Mohan; Nonyane, Molati; Madiga, Maphuti; Wibmer, Constantinos K.; Sheward, Daniel; Bailer, Robert T.; Gao, Hongmei; Greene, Kelli M.; Karim, Salim S. A.; Mascola, John R.; Korber, Bette T. M.; Montefiori, David C.; Morris, Lynn; Williamson, Carolyn; Seoighe, Cathal; the CAVD-NSDP Consortium
    Background Identification of the epitopes targeted by antibodies that can neutralize diverse HIV-1 strains can provide important clues for the design of a preventative vaccine. Methods We have developed a computational approach that can identify key amino acids within the HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein that influence sensitivity to broadly cross-neutralizing antibodies. Given a sequence alignment and neutralization titers for a panel of viruses, the method works by fitting a phylogenetic model that allows the amino acid frequencies at each site to depend on neutralization sensitivities. Sites at which viral evolution influences neutralization sensitivity were identified using Bayes factors (BFs) to compare the fit of this model to that of a null model in which sequences evolved independently of antibody sensitivity. Conformational epitopes were identified with a Metropolis algorithm that searched for a cluster of sites with large Bayes factors on the tertiary structure of the viral envelope. Results We applied our method to ID50 neutralization data generated from seven HIV-1 subtype C serum samples with neutralization breadth that had been tested against a multi-clade panel of 225 pseudoviruses for which envelope sequences were also available. For each sample, between two and four sites were identified that were strongly associated with neutralization sensitivity (2ln(BF) > 6), a subset of which were experimentally confirmed using site-directed mutagenesis. Conclusions Our results provide strong support for the use of evolutionary models applied to cross-sectional viral neutralization data to identify the epitopes of serum antibodies that confer neutralization breadth.