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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Molecular Plant Pathology Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #410199
Research Project: Emerging Stress Challenges and Functional Genomics of Stress Responses in Alfalfa

Location: Molecular Plant Pathology Laboratory

Title: Selective diversity in RNA viruses: do they know how to evolve? A hypothesis

Author
item Nemchinov, Lev

Submitted to: Bioessays
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 1/27/2025
Publication Date: 2/7/2025
Citation: Nemchinov, L.G. 2025. Selective diversity in RNA viruses: do they know how to evolve? A hypothesis. Bioessays. 47(4). Article e202400281. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.202400281.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.202400281

Interpretive Summary: The invulnerability of some of the most threatening viral infections depends to a great extent on their continuous diversity. Finding an exact pattern of this diversity and intervention strategies to mitigate it would be a baseline contribution to the prophylaxis and treatment of viral diseases. It is expected that a hypothesis presented in this paper will be of interest to a wide range of scientists working in the fields of plant and animal virology, plant pathology, evolution and population genetics.

Technical Abstract: Genetic diversity of viral populations is almost unanimously attributed to the build-up of random mutations along with accidental recombination events. This passive role of viruses in the selection of viable genotypes is widely acknowledged. According to the hypothesis presented here, populations of steady-state error copies of a master viral sequence would have a dominant mutant rather than a random pool of heterogeneous viral genomeswith changes scattered uniformly without any preferential distribution. It would let viruses face the selection stage of host surveillance having a preceding set of potential survivors or “guard” genomes among an ordinary cloud of random quasispecies.