The H5N1 avian influenza virus is mutating to evade immune defenses in mammals following prior infection or vaccination.

New computational modeling of avian influenza variants' immunoprotein interactions—developed by a research team at the ...

Influenza is one of the most unpredictable of diseases. Each year, the virus mutates slightly in a process called antigenic drift. The greater the mutation, the less likely that your immune system ...

A new study by LMU and Helmholtz Munich shows how pathogens control changes in their cell surface to evade the immune system.

The immune system responds to an infection by producing antibodies that recognize and bind to the cell surface of the pathogen, thus marking it as an intruder and triggering an immune response. For ...

"This strategy is known as antigenic variation," explains physicist Maria Colomé-Tatché, who is Professor of Functional Genomics and Cell Biology at LMU's Biomedical Center and leader of the ...

Usually such mutations are minor, resulting in a process called antigenic drift. Even minor changes in the virus’s make-up, however, mean that new vaccines must be developed to combat it.

Catani and colleagues provide data on antigenic properties of neuraminidase proteins of pandemic H1N1 and show that antigenic diversity of the neuraminidase from 2009 to 2020 largely falls into two ...