Evolutionary selection against short nucleotide sequences in viruses and their related hosts.

ABSTRACT: Viruses are under constant evolutionary pressure to effectively interact with the host intracellular factors, while evading its immune system. Understanding how viruses co-evolve with their hosts is a fundamental topic in molecular evolution and may also aid in developing novel viral based applications such as vaccines, oncologic therapies, and anti-bacterial treatments. Here, based on a novel statistical framework and a large-scale genomic analysis of 2,625 viruses from all classes infecting 439 host organisms from all kingdoms of life, we identify short nucleotide sequences that are under-represented in the coding regions of viruses and their hosts. These sequences cannot be explained by the coding regions' amino acid content, codon, and dinucleotide frequencies. We specifically show tha

SUBMITTER: Zarai Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7320823 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature