(…) The ability for viruses to mutate and evade the human immune system and cause infection is called viral escape. (…) We modeled viral escape with machine learning algorithms originally developed for human natural language. (…) We identified escape mutations as those that preserve viral infectivity but cause a virus to look different to the immune system, akin to word changes that preserve a sentence’s grammaticality but change its meaning. (…) Our study represents a promising conceptual bridge between natural language and viral evolution.
