Related papers: Viral RNA replication modes: evolutionary and dyna…
RNA viruses comprise vast populations of closely related, but highly genetically diverse, entities known as quasispecies. Understanding the mechanisms by which this extreme diversity is generated and maintained is fundamental when…
RNA viruses are a widely used tool to study evolution experimentally. Many standard protocols of virus propagation and competition are done at nominally low multiplicity of infection (m.o.i.), but lead during one passage to two or more…
This paper analyzes a simplified model of viral infection and evolution using the 'grand canonical ensemble' and formalisms from statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to enumerate all possible viruses and to derive thermodynamic…
RNA viruses form genetically diverse populations structured as mutant spectra, or quasispecies, whose internal organization influences their evolutionary and adaptive dynamics. While genetic diversity has been extensively characterized, the…
Replication of single-stranded RNA virus can be complicated, compared to that of double-stranded virus, as it require production of intermediate antigenomic strands that then serve as template for the genomic-sense strands. Moreover, for…
RNA viruses exist in large intra-host populations which display great genotypic and phenotypic diversity. We analyze a model of viral competition between two different viral strains infecting a constantly replenished cell pool, in which we…
Myriad viruses use positive-strand RNA molecules as their genomes. Far from being only a repository of genetic material, viral RNA performs numerous other functions mediated by its physical structure and chemical properties. In this…
We present a simple kinetic model for the assembly of small single-stranded RNA viruses that can be used to carry out analytical packaging contests between different types of RNA molecules. The RNA selection mechanism is purely kinetic and…
Based on a recent model of evolving viruses competing with an adapting immune system [1], we study the conditions under which a viral quasispecies can maximize its growth rate. The range of mutation rates that allows viruses to thrive is…
Gene-sharing networks provide a powerful framework to study the evolution of viruses and mobile genetic elements. These bipartite networks, which link genes to the genomes that contain them, exhibit characteristic degree distributions: a…
Defective interfering particles arise spontaneously during a viral infection as mutants lacking essential parts of the viral genome. Their ability to replicate in the presence of the wild-type (WT) virus (at the expense of viable viral…
Multiscale mathematical models of hepatitis C infection have been instrumental in our understanding of direct acting antivirals. These models include the mechanisms driving intracellular viral production and explicitly model the…
Single-stranded (ss) RNA viruses self-assemble spontaneously in solutions that contain the viral RNA genome molecules and viral capsid proteins. The self-assembly of empty capsids can be understood on the basis of free energy minimization.…
In this letter we study the full semi-conservative treatment of a model for the co-evolution of a virus and an adaptive immune system. Regions of viability are calculated for both conservatively and semi-conservatively replicating viruses…
Multipartite viruses replicate through a puzzling evolutionary strategy. Their genome is segmented into two or more parts, and encapsidated in separate particles that appear to propagate independently. Completing the replication cycle,…
We introduce a minimal multiscale framework that links within-host virus dynamics to population-level SIRS epidemiology through explicit, bidirectional coupling. At the microscopic layer, a two variant quasispecies (master and mutant…
Diversity-Generating Retroelements (DGRs) create rapid, targeted variation within specific genomic regions in phages and bacteria. They operate through stochastic retro-transcription of a template region (TR) into a variable region (VR),…
Cross-protection, which refers to a process whereby artificially inoculating a plant with a mild strain provides protection against a more aggressive isolate of the virus, is known to be an effective tool of disease control in plants. In…
In this paper we revisit and adapt to viral evolution an approach based on the theory of branching process advanced by Demetrius, Schuster and Sigmund ("Polynucleotide evolution and branching processes", Bull. Math. Biol. 46 (1985)…
Viruses constantly undergo mutations with genomic changes. The propagation of variants of viruses is an interesting problem. We perform numerical simulations of the microscopic epidemic model based on network theory for the spread of…