lots of viruses, in particular rna viruses, have high mutation rates and relatively short generation times. particle stability during infection in nature or in laboratory triggers the evolutionary event toward different mechanisms such as genome segmentation, point mutation and  recombination. the frequency of mutant genomes increase and modify  the previous distribution, which, consequently, l...

Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) serotypes O, A and Asia1 are responsible for a significant number of disease outbreaks in Iraq. The current study can be considered as the first molecular characterization of serotype Asia1 in Iraq. The present investigation reports the detection of serotype FMDV Asia1 from local farms in Sulaimani districts in 2012 and 2014 outbreaks. Phylogenetic analysis o...

Explaining the origin of viruses remains an important challenge for evolutionary biology. Previous explanatory frameworks described viruses as founders of cellular life, as parasitic reductive products of ancient cellular organisms or as escapees of modern genomes. Each of these frameworks endow viruses with distinct molecular, cellular, dynamic and emergent properties that carry broad and impo...