Viral evolution through the lens of statistical physics

Pathogens such as HIV and SARS-CoV-2 pose serious threats to public health. Better understanding of how these pathogens evolve could inform efforts to control outbreaks and improve the design of vaccines. In this talk, I’ll discuss how we can model the evolution of viruses quantitatively. I’ll also show how we can use ideas from statistical physics to fit quantitative evolutionary models to data, allowing us to understand how different mutations affect viral replication or transmission. We’ll explore two examples: understanding how HIV evolves within patients to escape from the immune system and how SARS-CoV-2 has evolved to become more transmissible over the course of the pandemic.

Host: Purushottam Dixit