An atlas of continuous adaptive evolution in endemic human viruses

Abstract

Through antigenic evolution, viruses such as seasonal influenza evade recognition by neutralizing antibodies. This means that a person with antibodies well tuned to an initial infection will not be protected against the same virus years later and that vaccine-mediated protection will decay. To expand our understanding of which endemic human viruses evolve in this fashion, we assess adaptive evolution across the genome of 28 endemic viruses spanning a wide range of viral families and transmission modes. Surface proteins consistently show the highest rates of adaptation, and ten viruses in this panel are estimated to undergo antigenic evolution to selectively fix mutations that enable the escape of prior immunity. Thus, antibody evasion is not an uncommon evolutionary strategy among human viruses, and monitoring this evolution will inform future vaccine efforts. Additionally, by comparing overall amino acid substitution rates, we show that SARS-CoV-2 is accumulating protein-coding changes at substantially faster rates than endemic viruses.

Keywords: adaptive evolution; antigenic evolution; endemic viruses; evolutionary biology; viral evolution.