Speaker
Description
Viral infection can substantially alter the selection of mutant cells, particularly in spatially structured settings. Understanding how infection shapes evolutionary dynamics is relevant both for cancer cells targeted by oncolytic viruses and for bacteria subject to bacteriophage infection. While cellular resistance to infection is one important dimension of this problem, I focus here on advantageous and deleterious mutants that remain equally susceptible to infection, such as drug-resistant cancer cell mutants.
I first quantify how selection is modified in spatially structured cell populations subject to virus infection, using mutant fixation probabilities as the key metric. I show that infection substantially weakens selection: advantageous mutants become less advantageous, and deleterious mutants become less deleterious. This effect is driven by spatial patterns that emerge from the infection process itself. I then turn to expanding cell colonies and show that infection can either increase or decrease the number of mutants in the expanding population, depending on assumptions about mutant fitness.
Together, these results illuminate how viral infection reshapes evolutionary dynamics in spatially structured cell populations , with direct implications for understanding how the presence of a virus alters the clonal composition of a tumor and its subsequent response to chemotherapy or targeted therapies.
