Why do RNA viruses recombine?

By Etienne Simon-Loriere, Edward C. Holmes. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 2011

687 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recombination occurs in many RNA viruses and can be of major evolutionary significance. However, rates of recombination vary dramatically among RNA viruses, which can range from clonal to highly recombinogenic. Here, we review the factors that might explain this variation in recombination frequency and show that there is little evidence that recombination is favoured by natural selection to create advantageous genotypes or purge deleterious mutations, as predicted if recombination functions as a form of sexual reproduction. Rather, recombination rates seemingly reflect larger-scale patterns of viral genome organization, such that recombination may be a mechanistic by-product of the evolutionary pressures acting on other aspects of virus biology.

Subfields: Genetics, Plant Science, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a81761e73c3fa74bdeb867c9fadf6835496cae65

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In Genetics

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

Daniel I. S. Rosenbloom

Citations in the corpus

Replication-competent non-induced proviruses in the latent reservoir increase barrier to HIV-1 cure (2013, background): “Frequent template switching events occur during reverse transcription (Simon-Loriere and Holmes, 2011).”
Molecular Evolution of Zika Virus during Its Emergence in the 20th Century (2014, background): “Given the limited sampling that we investigated, these results indicate that ZIKV may be experiencing recombination in the field, which is uncommon among flaviviruses [66].”