Year: 2022

"A SPECIES is often defined as a group of individuals that actually or potentially interbreed in nature. In this sense, a species is the biggest gene pool possible under natural conditions. The definition of a species as a group of interbreeding individuals cannot be easily applied to organisms that reproduce only or mainly asexually. Also, many plants, and some animals, form hybrids in nature. Should they be considered the same species or separate species?" https://lnkd.in/e3Bgi6R View in LinkedIn

DEFINITIONAL CONVENIENCE? "There are lots of other places where the boundary of a species is blurred. It's not so surprising that these blurry places exist — after all, the idea of a species is something that we humans invented for our own convenience!" http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_41 View in LinkedIn

"VIRAL QUASISPECIES are the mutant distributions (also termed mutant swarms or mutant clouds) that are generated upon replication of RNA viruses, and some DNA viruses in infected cells and organisms." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

MUTANT SWARMS. "Evolution of RNA viruses occurs through disequilibria of collections of closely related mutant spectra or mutant clouds termed viral quasispecies." https://lnkd.in/d9Upsp3 View in LinkedIn

QUASISPECIES. "Two main aspects are addressed: (i) mutant clouds as reservoirs of phenotypic variants for virus adaptability and (ii) the internal interactions that are established within mutant spectra that render a virus ensemble the unit of selection." http://mmbr.asm.org/content/76/2/159.short View in LinkedIn

FIRST LIFE FORMS. "The quasispecies concept originated in a theoretical formulation of molecular evolution that emphasized error-prone replication of simple RNA or RNA-like replicons as an essential feature of self-organization and adaptability of primitive life forms." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

DARWINIAN VIEW. "Viral quasispecies are currently defined as collections of closely related viral genomes subjected to a continuous process of genetic variation, competition among the variants generated, and selection of the most fit distributions in a given environment." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

GIANT POPULATIONS. "An important aspect of the quasispecies concept is that the large size of virus populations enables positive and negative interactions between individual viruses to establish a quasi-equilibrium of the variant proportions. Genetic variation is generated by the accumulation of mutations during replication and their re-arrangement by genetic recombination, and genome segment reassortment in the case of segmented genomes." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

MILLIONS OF PROGENY. "RNA viruses have tremendous reproductive capacity, generating thousands of progeny per genome. Despite frequent bottleneck events, a total population of millions of viruses in an infected host is not uncommon." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn

MUTANT PANDEMICS. "Mutant swarms are established within single infected cells and cell clusters and in infected organisms during disease episodes, outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn