Flow of Information during an Evolutionary Process: The Case of Influenza A Viruses

The hypothesis that Mutual Information (MI) dendrograms of influenza A viruses reflect informational groups generated during viral evolutionary processes is put forward. Phylogenetic reconstructions are used for guidance and validation of MI dendrograms. It is found that MI profiles display an oscillatory behavior for each of the eight RNA segments of influenza A. It is shown that dendrograms of MI values of geographically and historically different segments coming from strains of RNA virus influenza A turned out to be unexpectedly similar to the clusters, but not with the topology of the phylogenetic trees. No matter how diverse the RNA sequences are, MI dendrograms crisply discern actual viral subtypes together with gain and/or losses of information that occur during viral evolution. The amount of information during a century of evolution of RNA segments of influenza A is measured in terms of bits of information for both human and avian strains. Overall the amount of information of segments of pandemic strains oscillates during viral evolution. To our knowledge this is the first description of clades of information of the viral subtypes and the estimation of the flow content of information, measured in bits, during an evolutionary process of a virus.