A universal computational model for predicting antigenic variants of influenza A virus based on conserved antigenic structures.
Rapid determination of the antigenicity of influenza A virus could help identify the antigenic variants in time. Currently, there is a lack of computational models for predicting antigenic variants of some common hemagglutinin (HA) subtypes of influenza A viruses. By means of sequence analysis, we demonstrate here that multiple HA subtypes of influenza A virus undergo similar mutation patterns of HA1 protein (the immunogenic part of HA). Further analysis on the antigenic variation of influenza A virus H1N1, H3N2 and H5N1 showed that the amino acid residues' contribution to antigenic variation highly differed in these subtypes, while the regional bands, defined based on their distance to the top of HA1, played conserved roles in antigenic variation of these subtypes. Moreover, the computational models for predicting antigenic variants based on regional bands performed much better in the testing HA subtype than those did based on amino acid residues. Therefore, a universal computational model, named PREDAV-FluA, was built based on the regional bands to predict the antigenic variants for all HA subtypes of influenza A viruses. The model achieved an accuracy of 0.77 when tested with avian influenza H9N2 viruses. It may help for rapid identification of antigenic variants in influenza surveillance.
College of Biology, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China.
Yousong
Y
Peng
National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention, China CDC, Beijing, 102206, China.
Dayan
D
Wang
College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China.
Jianhong
J
Wang
College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China.
Kenli
K
Li
College of Biology, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China.
Zhongyang
Z
Tan
National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention, China CDC, Beijing, 102206, China.
Yuelong
Y
Shu
Center of System Medicine, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences &Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, 100005, China.|Suzhou Institute of Systems Medicine, Suzhou, Jiangsu, 215123, China.
Taijiao
T
Jiang
D000818:Animals; D000940:Antigenic Variation; D000956:Antigens, Viral / Q000737:chemistry / Q000276:immunology*; D019295:Computational Biology; D006389:Hemagglutinins, Viral / Q000276:immunology*; D009980:Influenza A virus / Q000235:genetics / Q000276:immunology*; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein
D000956:Antigens, Viral; D006389:Hemagglutinins, Viral