Intergenic incompatibilities reduce fitness in hybrids of extremely closely related bacteriophages.

ABSTRACT: Horizontal gene transfer and recombination occur across many groups of viruses and play key roles in important viral processes such as host-range expansion and immune-system avoidance. To have any predictive power regarding the ability of viruses to readily recombine, we must determine the extent to which epistasis restricts the success of recombinants, particularly as it relates to the genetic divergence between parental strains. In any hybridization event, the evolutionary success or failure of hybrids is largely determined by the pervasiveness of epistasis in the parental genomes. Recombination has previously been shown to incur steep fitness costs in highly divergent viruses as a result of disrupted epistatic interactions. We used a pair of bacteriophages of the family Microviridae to

SUBMITTER: Sackman AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4627924 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature