Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, Rich Condit, and Kirsten Sanford On episode #83 of the podcast This Week in Virology, Vincent, Alan, Rich, and special guest Dr. Kirsten Sanford talk about her career in science media, then consider whether smallpox eradication led to the AIDS pandemic, high fidelity RNA synthesis, and a new Ebola virus …
The contamination of the rotavirus vaccine Rotarix with porcine circovirus 1 DNA was revealed by deep sequencing. The same technique was also used to demonstrate that oral poliovirus vaccine does not contain viruses that can cause poliomyelitis. The oral poliovirus vaccine strains developed by Albert Sabin (pictured) were licensed in the United States in 1962, …
Mutation is an important source of RNA virus diversity that is made possible by the error-prone nature of RNA synthesis. Viruses with segmented genomes, such as influenza virus, have another mechanism for generating diversity: reassortment. When an influenza virus infects a cell, the individual RNA segments enter the nucleus. There they are copied many times …
Scientists and philosophers have long debated the trajectory of evolution. Some of the questions they consider include: is there a predictable direction for evolution, and if there is, what is the pathway? Are there evolutionary dead ends? Viruses are excellent subjects for the study of evolution: they have short generation times, high yields of offspring, …
The recent series of posts on polymerase error rates and viral evolution has elicited many excellent and thought provoking comments from readers of virology blog. Here is one that I had not thought of before, and which I’ll use on an exam in my virology course: Here’s a tough question. In the follow up blog …
Why don’t DNA based organisms discard error repair? Read More »
If you have been following our discussion of quasispecies here on virology blog, you might be wondering exactly how many possible variants there are for a viral genome. The answer is quite simple: for a genome N nucleotides in length, there are 4N possible variants, because there are 4 different nucleotides. This is a huge …
