The scales of viral-host co-evolution.

Does host-pathogen co-evolution constrain the space viral trajectories? I will show that co-evolution between immune systems and viruses in a finite-dimensional antigenic space can be described by an antigenic wave pushed forward and canalized by host-pathogen interactions. This leads to a new emergent timescale, the persistence time of the wave's direction in antigenic space, which can be much longer than the coalescence time of the viral population.