RNA Virus Reassortment: An Evolutionary Mechanism for Host Jumps and Immune Evasion

Reassortment is an evolutionary mechanism of segmented RNA viruses that plays an important but ill-defined role in virus emergence and interspecies transmission. Recent experimental studies have greatly enhanced our understanding of the cellular mechanisms of reassortment within a host cell. Our purpose here is to offer a brief introduction on the role of reassortment in segmented RNA virus evolution, explain the host cellular mechanisms of reassortment, and provide a synthesis of recent experimental findings and methodological developments. While we focus our discussion on influenza viruses, wherein most of the studies on reassortment have been carried out, the concepts presented are broadly applicable to other multipartite genomes.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  PLoS Pathogens

• Publication date

  2015-07-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.ppat.1004902PMID 26158697PMCID 4497687
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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