ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2013
The antigenic evolution of influenza: drift or thrift?
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- From sites to structure to serology: a roadmap for structure-aware molecular evolution of antigenically evolving viruses.Journal of virology · 2026Review
- LAMP-Based 4-Channel Microfluidic Chip for POCT Detection of Influenza A H1N1, H3N2, and Influenza B Victoria Viruses.Biosensors · 2025Article
- Topolow: a mapping algorithm for antigenic cross-reactivity and binding affinity assays.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Unveiling the role of host kinases at different steps of influenza A virus life cycle.Journal of virology · 2024Review
- Clinical profile of children with influenza like illness during pre-monsoon at coastal Karaikal, Puducherry, India.Bioinformation · 2024Article
- Ecological and evolutionary dynamics of multi-strain RNA viruses.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Review
- Safe Practice of Flexible Bronchoscopy for Non-COVID-19 Indications during the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic.Tanaffos · 2022Article
- Influenza immune escape under heterogeneous host immune histories.Trends in microbiology · 2021Review
- COVID-19 in Africa: rethinking the tools to manage future pandemics.African health sciences · 2021Article
- Review
- Immunopathological similarities between COVID-19 and influenza: Investigating the consequences of Co-infection.Microbial pathogenesis · 2021Review
- Influenza Viruses: Harnessing the Crucial Role of the M2 Ion-Channel and Neuraminidase toward Inhibitor Design.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Analysis of protective immune responses to seasonal influenza vaccination in HIV-infected individuals.Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics · 2021Article
- Asynchrony between virus diversity and antibody selection limits influenza virus evolution.eLife · 2020Article
- Influenza.Indian journal of pediatrics · 2020Review
- Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2020Article
- Detecting outliers in segmented genomes of flu virus using an alignment-free approach.Genomics & informatics · 2020Article
- A spatio-temporal analysis of influenza-like illness in Iran from 2011 to 2016.Medical journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran · 2020Article
- Recombinant GII.P16/GII.4 Sydney 2012 Was the Dominant Norovirus Identified in Australia and New Zealand in 2017.Viruses · 2018Article
- High dimensional random walks can appear low dimensional: Application to influenza H3N2 evolution.Journal of theoretical biology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is commonly assumed that antibody responses against the influenza virus are polarized in the following manner: strong antibody responses are directed at highly variable antigenic epitopes, which consequently undergo 'antigenic drift', while weak antibody responses develop against conserved epitopes. As the highly variable epitopes are in a constant state of flux, current antibody-based vaccine strategies are focused on the conserved epitopes in the expectation that they will provide some level of clinical protection after appropriate boosting. Here, we use a theoretical model to suggest the existence of epitopes of low variability, which elicit a high degree of both clinical and transmission-blocking immunity. We show that several epidemiological features of influenza and its serological and molecular profiles are consistent with this model of 'antigenic thrift', and that identifying the protective epitopes of low variability predicted by this model could offer a more viable alternative to regularly update the influenza vaccine than exploiting responses to weakly immunogenic conserved regions.
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