Distilling evidence of long-range direction-specific causal cross-talk in molecular evolution of retro-viral genomes

Rapid molecular evolution in retroviruses potentially pose a hurdle to effective vaccine design. While the coding sequence for viral surface proteins seemingly mutate randomly from point to point, the necessity of conserved function dictates the often suspected existence of hidden correlations and long-range dependencies between non-colocated sequence positions. In this initial report, we present a fundamentally new approach to infer the direction-specific causal dependencies that underlie the sequence changes driving viral evolution. Using no prior knowledge of viral genomes, or expectations of known patterns, we show that our algorithm distills the network of causality flows, identifying key regions of immunological vulnerabilities. Such computationally identified vulnerabilities may open the door to new vaccine designs that highly mutable retroviruses such as HIV fail to evade.