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"CUMULATIVE EVOLUTION at the level of nucleic acid codes (genetic code based on DNA or RNA) is not solely what remains out of natural selection processes of mutations (error replication). Cumulative evolution is more like a ‘‘ratchet effect’’, which as originally used was metaphor -- like means for the cultural transmission of learned experiences to the next generations." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

SURVIVAL ADVANTAGE. "Although viruses can clearly kill their host, they can also colonize their host without disease and thus sometimes protect the host from the same or similar virus. This new virus–host combination can thus provide an ‘antiviral’ survival advantage, especially in a virus-rich habitat. Since it is transmissible, such survival can also apply to groups that were virus colonized (not necessarily direct kin)." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

NOVEL STRATEGY. "This ‘infectious’ colonization by new addiction modules is a main process in generating new sequence space without error-replication and therefore in the evolution, conservation and plasticity of genetic identities." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

VIRAL ADDICTION MODULES. "Although rather stable under certain circumstances, this addiction balance can also get out of balance which means the competing viral features may become virulent again. But when stable, we can find such counter-regulating paired genes of the addiction modules, as in the RM (restriction/modulation) systems as well as in TA (toxin/antitoxin) systems." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

COOPERATIVE STRATEGY. "Viruses can co-operate, that is they interact to build groups that invade host genomes and even compete as a group for limited resources such as host genomes. This leads to an extraordinary effective result and a key behavioral motif that is able to integrate a persistent lifestyle into cellular host organisms, the ‘‘addiction’’ modules: former competing viral groups are counterbalancing each other together with the host immune system." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

INCOMPARABLY MORE EXTENSIVE. "All these lines of evidence and reasoning suggest that the principal classes of prokaryotic viruses, including positive-strand RNA viruses, retroid elements, and several groups of DNA viruses, emerged within the primordial genetic pool where mixing and matching of diverse genetic elements was incomparably more extensive than it is in any modern biological community." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

NO COMMON ROOT. "Comparative genomics provides no evidence of a monophyletic origin of all viruses. Many virus groups simply share no common genes, effectively, ruling out any conventional notion of common origin. When applied to viruses, the notion of "common genes" is not a simple one because commonality is not necessarily limited to clear-cut orthologous relationships between genes that translate into highly significant sequence similarity." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

FEW NEEDED. "Importantly, a key feature of this viral lifestyle is that only few need to remain as functional agents, such as mammalian endogenous retroviruses needed for in the syncytia, which regulates mammalian pregnancy. Here, a much larger number of retroviral-derived code (LTRs) are providing the regulatory network of the placenta." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

VIRAL NICHES. "The extraordinary diversity of double-stranded (ds) DNA bacteriophages is in a stark contrast to the absence of bona fide dsDNA viruses in plants. Conversely, RNA viruses are extremely abundant and diverse in plants and animals but are currently represented by only two compact families in bacteria, and so far have not been detected in archaea." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

DARK MATTER. "The visible living world of organisms of all domains is literarily the tip of the iceberg surrounded by biology’s viral ‘‘dark matter’’ of which we are currently scratching the surface at best." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn