Reminder: ISCBacademy Webinar with Nico Pfeifer today!

[Fernando Meyer]

The ISCBacademy webinar today, February 25, 2025, at 3:00 PM CET (9:00 AM EST), features Nico Pfeifer from the University of Tübingen on "Modeling microbe evolution due to immune system pressure." The event will be moderated by Alice McHardy.

Modeling microbe evolution due to immune system pressure

In many environments, microbes are constantly facing evolutionary pressure from different agents. One important pressure is asserted by the immune system. Especially for viruses, the variants have to adapt to the adaptive immune system to establish a chronic infection.

HIV is one of the viruses, where this adaptation process has been well studied. With our research, we have contributed computational methods to model the adaptation of the virus to the immune system pressure. I will give an overview of the challenges, the early models [1] as well as recent updates on how to model this efficiently [2]. Furthermore, I will show that correcting for the founder effects leads to more accurate predictions and point out implications for bacterial analyses like resistance prediction for Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

1. Carlson, J., Du, V., Pfeifer, N. et al. Impact of pre-adapted HIV transmission. Nat Med 22, 606–613 (2016)

2. Hake, A., Germann, A., de Beer, C. et al. Insights to HIV-1 coreceptor usage by estimating HLA adaptation with Bayesian generalized linear mixed models, PLOS Computational Biology, 19(12): e1010355 (2023)

Join the Webinar by logging in to ISCB Nucleus