Machine-learning a virus assembly fitness landscape.

Realistic evolutionary fitness landscapes are notoriously difficult to construct. A recent cutting-edge model of virus assembly consists of a dodecahedral capsid with 12 corresponding packaging signals in three affinity bands. This whole genome/phenotype space consisting of 312 genomes has been expl...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pierre-Philippe Dechant, Yang-Hui He
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250227
Description
Summary:Realistic evolutionary fitness landscapes are notoriously difficult to construct. A recent cutting-edge model of virus assembly consists of a dodecahedral capsid with 12 corresponding packaging signals in three affinity bands. This whole genome/phenotype space consisting of 312 genomes has been explored via computationally expensive stochastic assembly models, giving a fitness landscape in terms of the assembly efficiency. Using latest machine-learning techniques by establishing a neural network, we show that the intensive computation can be short-circuited in a matter of minutes to astounding accuracy.
ISSN:1932-6203