ArticleNature ecology & evolution2022
Antigenic escape selects for the evolution of higher pathogen transmission and virulence.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Virulent Parasites Emerge in Hosts With Rising Temperatures.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics of Pathogen Epidemic Timing in a Seasonal Environment.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Non-ergodicity in ecology and evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Seasonal forcing and waning immunity drive the sub-annual periodicity of the COVID-19 epidemic.PLoS pathogens · 2026Article
- Modeling the dynamics of seasonal influenza in response to meteorological conditions and antigenic variation: a simulation study.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Avian influenza and One Health: bridging animal and human health through integrated surveillance and vaccination.Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2026Review
- Eco-evolutionary dynamics of pathogen immune-escape: deriving a population-level phylodynamic curve.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Human Riboviruses: A Comprehensive Study.Journal of molecular evolution · 2025Review
- Unveiling reverse vaccinology and immunoinformatics toward Saint Louis encephalitis virus: a ray of hope for vaccine development.Frontiers in immunology · 2025Article
- Potential impact of annual vaccination with reformulated COVID-19 vaccines: Lessons from the US COVID-19 scenario modeling hub.PLoS medicine · 2024Article
- The mRNA-LNP vaccines - the good, the bad and the ugly?Frontiers in immunology · 2024Review
- Review
- Isolation may select for earlier and higher peak viral load but shorter duration in SARS-CoV-2 evolution.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Potential impact of annual vaccination with reformulated COVID-19 vaccines: lessons from the U.S. COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2023Article
- Evolutionary stability of antigenically escaping viruses.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Do pathogens always evolve to be less virulent? The virulence-transmission trade-off in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.Biologia futura · 2023Review
- Virological characteristics of the SARS-CoV-2 XBB variant derived from recombination of two Omicron subvariants.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Contact-number-driven virus evolution: A multi-level modeling framework for the evolution of acute or persistent RNA virus infection.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- SARS-CoV-2 variant biology: immune escape, transmission and fitness.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2023Review
- Antigenic escape is accelerated by the presence of immunocompromised hosts.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
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3 authors at 3 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Despite the propensity for complex and non-equilibrium dynamics in nature, eco-evolutionary analytical theory typically assumes that populations are at equilibria. In particular, pathogens often show antigenic escape from host immune defences, leading to repeated epidemics, fluctuating selection and diversification, but we do not understand how this impacts the evolution of virulence. We model the impact of antigenic drift and escape on the evolution of virulence in a generalized pathogen and apply a recently introduced oligomorphic methodology that captures the dynamics of the mean and variance of traits, to show analytically that these non-equilibrium dynamics select for the long-term persistence of more acute pathogens with higher virulence. Our analysis predicts both the timings and outcomes of antigenic shifts leading to repeated epidemics and predicts the increase in variation in both antigenicity and virulence before antigenic escape. There is considerable variation in the degree of antigenic escape that occurs across pathogens and our results may help to explain the difference in virulence between related pathogens including, potentially, human influenzas. Furthermore, it follows that these pathogens will have a lower R
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.