We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server as of 1 March 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
MiS Preprint
27/2012
Immunity space generated by a non trivial genetic-antigenic relation
Lorenzo Taggi, Francesca Colaiori, Vittorio Loreto and Francesca Tria
Abstract
Cross-immunity plays a crucial role in the epidemiological properties of influenza A virus. Recent experimental studies have pointed out that genetic distances do not fully account for the observed antigenic clusters. In particular, jumps from an antigenic cluster to another seem to be triggered by correlated mutations. However, no specific sites determine whether a sequence belongs to a given antigenic cluster, suggesting that sites mutations could be dynamically correlated. In this paper we introduce an epistatic interaction rule among mutations that dynamically defines neutral clusters in the immunity space. We investigate the structure of this epistatic immunity space, highlighting how this can affect the dynamical properties of the virus-host interaction.
