Speaker:Anugrah Saxena

A Novel Multi-layered Epitope and Genetic Sequence Network for Predicting Antigenic Phenotype of H1 Influenza A Virus in Swine

Influenza A viruses (IAV) in swine constitute a major economic burden to an important global agricultural sector, impacts food security, and is a public health threat. Despite significant improvement in surveillance for IAV in swine over the past 10 years, sequence data have not been integrated into a systematic vaccine strain selection process for predicting antigenic phenotype and identifying determinants of antigenic drift. Through this project, we propose a novel pipeline that incorporates the genetic sequence data of the hemagglutinin protein, identifies immune epitopes within the protein, and creates a multi-layered network that allows inference of antigenic drift. This method can be applied to identify new IAV strains that have distinct epitopes, and determine which IAV strains are central within the multi-layer network that explain observed diversity with a potential to be good multi-valent IAV vaccine components.

Committee: Dr. Oliver Eulenstein (major professor), Dr. Tavis Anderson, and Dr. Philip C Gauger.

Join on Zoom: https://iastate.zoom.us/j/99097362429