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trvrb / flux

Integrating influenza antigenic dynamics with molecular evolution
http://bedford.io/papers/bedford-flux/
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Virus avidity #33

Closed trvrb closed 10 years ago

trvrb commented 10 years ago

I like how the authors have included "virus effects" alone in the new Table 1. At least one "virus effect" could be overall receptor avidity, and Plotkin and Hensley have a recent paper (Journal of Virology, 87:9904) showing that avidity can influence antigenic clustering. It might be worthwhile to include a sentence on the possibility that "virus effects" could be a manifestation of avidity?

trvrb commented 10 years ago

We appreciate this suggestion. Including the biological explanation for why we observe virus effects in the form of decreased or increased overall HI reactivity is very important. We've revised this section to include references to virus avidity and relabeled 'virus effects' to 'virus avidities'. This has the additional benefit of being more transparent of a term than the opaque 'effect.'

With the change from 'virus effect' to 'virus avidity' made, we chose to make a similar biological realignment of 'serum effect' to 'serum potency', i.e. some sera have higher potency than other other sera, allowing them to inhibit hemagglutination at lower concentrations than other sera. The use of potency here is meant to align with the neutralizing antibody literature which distinguishes neutralization potency from neutralization breadth. Antigenic cartography has not traditionally measured breadth of hemagglutination inhibition.