EscaPRRS-ORF5: a structure-aware evolutionary framework for prioritizing immune escape-prone variants in porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus

Abstract

Abstract Motivation Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome Virus (PRRSV) is a rapidly evolving RNA virus causing significant economic losses, posing a formidable challenge to vaccine efficacy due to its high mutational variability and immune escape. As the viral mutants evolve, their ability to sustain in population is driven by a range of host biology factors such as receptor binding, fusion, and uncoating. Existing tools that predict viral fitness and escape propensities rely heavily on extensive, up-to-date sequence data and lack integration of biochemical host interactions, limiting mechanistic understanding of the mutational landscape. We introduce Esca, a sequence-only toolchain framework that identifies immune escape-prone residues by exhaustively scanning each residue position for all amino acid substitutions using a Bayesian Variational Autoencoder (VAE) trained on protein language model embeddings. We demonstrate Esca on the GP5(ORF5) glycoprotein of PRRSV (EscaPRRS-ORF5) by training on ESM-2 embeddings of 32 146 GP5 sequences (2015–2022) spanning 140 sub-lineages. Results Despite being trained only on GP5 sequence data, EscaPRRS-ORF5 recovered 85.7% of the surface-exposed receptor binding interfaces as escape-prone regions. We use a mutation-sensitive fitness scoring scheme that goes beyond Hamming distances, to predict antibody escape tendencies, supporting surveillance of (re) emerging PRRSV variants. We do not claim that ORF5 alone captures PRRSV evolution or serves as a surveillance endpoint; rather, Esca offers a scalable path toward whole-genome, structure-aware surveillance. Availability and implementation EscaPRRS-ORF5 is freely available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.32661033 with an interactive Colab notebook at https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1TEgzAhPwvNAZ01VXeJbIFibfri2jnDA5? usp=sharing.