Conveners
Within-Host Dynamics & Adaptation
- Ramon Lorenzo-Redondo
- Bradley Jones (Department of Mathematics, Simon Fraser University)
Over the course of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, several divergent variants emerged which carried insertion-deletion mutations (indels), suggesting indels may be crucial in enabling the virus to adapt to changing host environments. However, indels are challenging to study, especially at the within-host level, as the process of sequencing and alignment generation can introduce artefacts. We...
Despite effective antiretroviral therapy (ART), HIV-1 persistence remains the principal barrier to a functional cure, driven by long-lived viral reservoirs whose defining features—particularly within tissues—remain poorly understood. Here, we introduce the Virus Microenvironment (VME) as a conceptual framework to explain how HIV-1 establishes, diversifies, and maintains tissue reservoirs that...
Background
Growing evidence suggests social interactions within viral populations may influence adaptation and persistence. For example, hepatitis C virus (HCV) is hypothesized to exhibit antigenic cooperation (AC), a kind of altruistic behavior enabling immune escape of specific variant populations. The AC model raises the question as to whether other chronic viral infections can be better...
Noroviruses are the leading cause of viral gastroenteritis, with most cases arising from genotype GII.4 infection. New GII.4 variants often emerge from long internal branches, a pattern similar to that observed for certain SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, such as Omicron and Alpha. For SARS-CoV-2, diverse phylogenetic evidence suggests that prolonged infections are the source of these variants....
