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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 Mar 21.
Published in final edited form as: Immunity. 2013 Mar 21;38(3):606–617. doi: 10.1016/j.immuni.2012.11.022

Figure 1.

Figure 1

Cartoon schematic of a viral fitness landscape. The replicative fitness of a viral strain is a function of its amino acid sequence. This information can be visualized as a topographical map where the amino acid sequence specifies a location on the landscape, and the height of the landscape prescribes viral fitness. For visualization purposes, this cartoon pertains to a virus consisting of only two residues. For multi-residue viral proteins, the fitness landscape is traced out in higher dimensions. The broken line indicates a hypothetical high-fitness mutational escape pathway from the global fitness maximum, to a nearby local maximum.