New research by a team of University of Florida investigators, and others, provides evidence that host immunity drives evolution of the dengue virus. The work, published Nov. 18 in Science, retrospectively analyzes two decades of dengue virus genetic variation from Thailand, alongside population-level measures of infection and immunity.
There are four types of dengue virus, and all four have co-circulated in Thailand since the early 1960s. This provides an opportunity to study how the viruses compete against each other for human hosts.