Greg Hart publishes paper on the HIV “viral error catastrophe” in Physical Review E

Greg and Prof. Ferguson have provided the first computational confirmation of the viral “error catastrophe” over a realistic viral fitness landscape in a paper published in Phys. Rev. E (http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.91.032705). Using a landscape for the HIV protein p6 inferred from clinical sequence databases, the error catastrophe — the lethal accumulation of mutations in the viral population — is manifested as a first order phase transition between a high-fitness population containing only a small number of mutant strains, and a low-fitness, highly-diverse ensemble. This work provides support for the viability of treating HIV with mutagenic drugs to induce the error catastrophe and cripple viral fitness, and also reveals particular mutations that can induce the catastrophe as new potential targets for antiviral drugs. Congratulations to Greg!