Computational Identification of Antigenicity-Associated Sites in the Hemagglutinin Protein of A/H1N1 Seasonal Influenza Virus

PLoS One. 2015 May 15;10(5):e0126742. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0126742. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

The antigenic variability of influenza viruses has always made influenza vaccine development challenging. The punctuated nature of antigenic drift of influenza virus suggests that a relatively small number of genetic changes or combinations of genetic changes may drive changes in antigenic phenotype. The present study aimed to identify antigenicity-associated sites in the hemagglutinin protein of A/H1N1 seasonal influenza virus using computational approaches. Random Forest Regression (RFR) and Support Vector Regression based on Recursive Feature Elimination (SVR-RFE) were applied to H1N1 seasonal influenza viruses and used to analyze the associations between amino acid changes in the HA1 polypeptide and antigenic variation based on hemagglutination-inhibition (HI) assay data. Twenty-three and twenty antigenicity-associated sites were identified by RFR and SVR-RFE, respectively, by considering the joint effects of amino acid residues on antigenic drift. Our proposed approaches were further validated with the H3N2 dataset. The prediction models developed in this study can quantitatively predict antigenic differences with high prediction accuracy based only on HA1 sequences. Application of the study results can increase understanding of H1N1 seasonal influenza virus antigenic evolution and accelerate the selection of vaccine strains.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Antigens, Viral / immunology
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Hemagglutinins / immunology*
  • Influenza A Virus, H1N1 Subtype / immunology*
  • Orthomyxoviridae / immunology
  • Support Vector Machine

Substances

  • Antigens, Viral
  • Hemagglutinins

Grants and funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.81102205) to XR and by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No.lzujbky-2012-155) to XR. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.