3 ms·
> What conditions would it need to be a new virus rather than a variation of the original one The Carl Woese (Woesian?) [0] definition that's been taught for a
by sndean 6y ago
> What conditions would it need to be a new virus rather than a variation of the original one
The Carl Woese (Woesian?) [0] definition that's been taught for a while is that when a certain sequence within two organisms exhibits a similarity score of < 97%, then it's new species. The certain sequences is generally 16S rRNA. That definition has its problems, but it's even more complicated for viruses: I think it differs for each virus family (e.g., Filovirus [2]). I just messaged a virologist and they said it's too complicated to explain over G-chat.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Woese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Woese
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16S_ribosomal_RNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16S_ribosomal_RNA
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21046175/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21046175/
- oehtXRwMkIs 6y agoThat's recently been narrowed down to 98.7% and really only applies to microorganisms, definitely not the definition used for species with sex. Furthermore, the DNA-DNA hybridization technique is considered outdated at this point so one has to take it with a grain of salt. Also, viruses aren't even organisms so I'm not really sure you can even talk about species with them. I have heard the term quasispecies used for them however.