Predicting virus mutations through statistical relational learning

Background: Viruses are typically characterized by high mutation rates, which allow them to quickly develop drug-resistant mutations. Mining relevant rules from mutation data can be extremely useful to understand the virus adaptation mechanism and to design drugs that effectively counter potentially resistant mutants.Results: We propose a simple statistical relational learning approach for mutant prediction where the input consists of mutation data with drug-resistance information, either as sets of mutations conferring resistance to a certain drug, or as sets of mutants with information on their susceptibility to the drug. The algorithm learns a set of relational rules characterizing drug-resistance and uses them to generate a set of potentially resistant mutants. Learning a weighted combination of rules allows to attach generated mutants with a resistance score as predicted by the statistical relational model and select only the highest scoring ones.Conclusions: Promising results wer...