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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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School of Physics Soft Condensed Matter & Physics of Living Systems: Prof. Susanna Manrubia, Spanish National Centre for Biotechnology (CSIC)
Viruses count amongst the most amazing organisms on Earth regarding their evolutionary and adaptive abilities. They resort to several different forms of coding information in their genomes; together with an array of different mutational mechanisms, they have succeeded in infecting all cellular organisms and in escaping any antiviral strategy (natural or artificial). We will present and discuss a puzzling example of viral adaptive strategy: viruses with multipartite genomes. Multipartite viruses possess fragmented genomes with fragments encapsidated in independent viral particles. This demands co-infection of cells to complete the viral cycle, a condition that poses severe restrictions on the number of viral particles infecting single cells. This kind of viruses infects mostly plants and represents about 16% of all viral species described. As of today, the adaptive advantage of multipartition in front of complete or fragmented genomes encapsidated in a single particle remains undisclosed.
