The Department of Chemical and Systems Biology Presents

Jesse Bloom, Ph.D.

Associate Member, Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

“Mapping person-to-person variation in viral mutations that escape human immunity to influenza virus”

The reason that humans are repeatedly infected with influenza virus throughout their lifetimes is that the virus evolves to escape from immunity. We have developed a deep-mutational-scanning based approach to precisely map the selection that polyclonal human immunity exerts on influenza virus. Our results reveal that the immunity of different individuals is often escaped by different viral mutations, indicating that person-to-person variation in the fine specificity of immunity could play a major role in shaping disease susceptibility and viral evolution. Finally, I will discuss future prospects for using high-throughput mutational assays to understand viral evolution and anti-viral immunity more generally.

Reading Material:

1. Juhye M Lee, Jesse D Bloom, et al. Mapping person-to-person variation in viral mutations that escape polyclonal serum targeting influenza hemagglutinin  eLife 2019;8:e49324.
2. Velislava N. Petrova, Colin A. Russell. The evolution of seasonal influenza viruses Rev Microbiol 16, 47–60 (2018) doi:10.1038/nrmicro.2017.118