The basic step towards understanding the capabilities of a pathogen is to see how it evolves. Dr. John Barton, a physicist at the University of California, has been working on developing models of pathogens such as HIV for several years to understand how they work. Recently, his research got discovered by the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the organization has decided to find it as well.
Barton is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California. He has been awarded the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (an award for early-stage investigators). This allowed his lab to work on different methods to understand how different mutations in pathogens can affect their ability to reproduce and survive.
Dr. John Barton says, “We are most interested in pathogens such as HIV, but in principle, the methods that we’re working on could be applied to many different types of the evolving population.” NIH has granted a five-year grant of nearly $1.86 million to fund two graduate students and two postdoctoral researchers under the title “Methods for Quantifying Selection in Evolving Populations”. Along with Rebecca Lynch at George Washington University, Barton will apply some of his laboratory methods to further study how pathogens such as the HIV virus evolves and how it escapes the antibody reaction of the infected persons’ body.
Dr. John Barton further explained how evolution plays a critical role in many public health challenges. He said, “For example, bacterial pathogens can evolve to become resistant to antibiotics, and cancer cells can evolve to hide from the immune system or resist chemotherapy. The methods that we are developing may allow us to get a better understanding of how processes like these take place, which may ultimately lead to the design of new and better treatments.”
The NIH grant will help Dr. John Barton to develop mathematical models in order to understand how pathogens evolve. He said, “We will try to understand what the data can tell us about the evolutionary process. We plan to apply our methods to a few important problems. One application is to understand how the HIV virus evolves to escape from the immune system. We also plan to use our methods to improve the interpretation of high-throughput mutagenesis experiments.”
Furthermore, Dr. Barton said that he understands that it can be difficult to examine the data about pathogens with existing methods. That’s why he’s evolving new techniques to understand how changes at the genetic level can drive evolution at the population level.
He said, “The question we are thinking about is the one that’s been considered by population geneticists for a long time. Two of the more novel features of the project are that we’re developing methods to look at genetic sequence data that’s been collected over time, which is an unexplored area; and we’re using some mathematical techniques that are common in physics but not so well known in population genetics, which makes our approach more computationally efficient than most prior work.”