Viral fitness and its immune escape can be modeled by using concepts of natural language Uncovering connections between seemingly unrelated branches of science might accelerate research in one branch by using the methods developed in the other branch as stepping stones. On page 284 of this issue, Hie et al. (1) provide an elegant example of such unexpected connections. The authors have uncovered a parallel between the properties of a virus and its interpretation by the host immune system and the properties of a sentence in natural language and its interpretation by a human. By leveraging an extensive natural language processing (NLP) toolbox (2, 3) developed over the years, they have come up with a powerful new method for the identification of mutations that allow a virus to escape from recognition by neutralizing antibodies.

中文翻译：

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病毒的语言

可以使用自然语言的概念对病毒适应性及其免疫逃逸进行建模 发现看似不相关的科学分支之间的联系可能会通过使用另一个分支中开发的方法作为垫脚石来加速一个分支的研究。在本期第 284 页，Hie 等人。(1) 提供这种意想不到的联系的优雅示例。作者发现了病毒的特性与其宿主免疫系统对其的解释与自然语言中句子的特性及其由人类的解释之间的相似之处。通过利用多年来开发的广泛的自然语言处理 (NLP) 工具箱 (2, 3)，他们提出了一种强大的新方法来识别突变，使病毒能够逃避中和抗体的识别。