In pursuit of intriguing puzzles

Existence and significance of viral nonreplicative RNA recombination

“…Due to all of the aforementioned complications, nonreplicative RNA recombination generates functional viral genomes far less frequently than replicative recombination. However, the promiscuity of nonreplicative recombination implies that it could be a widespread contributor to rare, but important, biological events [5][6][7][8]. In particular, nonreplicative recombination might be responsible for some of the numerous known [9,10] (and likely many more unknown) examples of horizontal transfer of genetic information between viruses and between viruses and cells, resulting in the acquisition of novel proteins and functional RNA elements.…”