Glycan Overcommitment Theory: Adaptive Compression and Structural Convergence in the HIV-1 Glycan Shield

Glycan Overcommitment Theory (GOT) proposes that increasing dependence upon glycan-mediated camouflage progressively reduces the diversity of successful canopy architectures available to HIV-1. While viral sequence diversity continues to expand, canopy-level adaptation becomes increasingly constrained, producing structural convergence despite ongoing genetic diversification. Building upon a curvature-corrected glycan packing parameter (Φcurv), the framework introduces adaptive compression as a mechanism through which steric exclusion, glycan-processing constraints, dynamic coupling, and canopy-level network behavior may generate recurring broadly neutralizing antibody (bnAb) vulnerability landscapes. The manuscript develops a quantitative framework including the Adaptive Freedom Index (AFI), Canopy Diversity Score (CDS), Canopy Coupling Coefficient (CCC), Structural Convergence Ratio (SCR), and Overcommitment Index (OI), and proposes an experimental roadmap for evaluating structural convergence in HIV Env glycan canopies. The theory has implications for HIV vaccine design, broadly neutralizing antibody development, and long-acting prevention and treatment strategies.