Certain Flu Virus Mutations May Compensate for Fitness Costs of Other Mutations (IMAGE)

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Certain Flu Virus Mutations May Compensate for Fitness Costs of Other Mutations

Caption

Influenza A virus hemagglutinin trimer is depicted in cartoon form, with monomers colored, green, blue and wheat. The bottom of the trimer would be attached to virions. Sialic acids bound to the HA are shown in yellow in space filling form. A computationally modeled glycan, depicted in red, is shown attached to one of the asparagine residues that is gained via mutation and natural selection of Sequential 12 virus. This glycan reduces the avidity of virus attachment to cell surface terminal sialic acid residues to wild type virus levels, and restores fitness to Sequential 12 virus for growth in eggs. The glycan is attached to all three monomers, but for purposes of illustration, is added to just a single monomer. The image was generated by the authors from PDB file 1RU7 using Pymol software and the GlyProt web server: www.glycosciences.de/modeling/glyprot/php/main.php to add a model glycan.

Credit

Kosik, et al. (2018)

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