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Updated: Apr 5, 2026

Arbovirus Infections As Screening Tools for the Identification of Viral Immunomodulators and Host Antiviral Factors
Published on: September 13, 2018
Viral evolution and epidemiology
Katrin Leitmeyer1, Rebeca Rico-Hesse1
1Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, Department of Virology and Immunology, San Antonio, Texas, USA.
Abstract:
This review highlights recent research on viral evolution and its use towards understanding disease pathogenesis and epidemiology. The development of techniques such as enzymatic amplification of viral genomes and automated sequencing has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of sequence information from clinical samples. These sequences (RNA or DNA, or the amino acids they encode) have been compared by complex computer algorithms to generate evolutionary trees or phylogenies of natural virus variants, which can sometimes be used to correlate viral genotype with phenotype. Understanding the rates and types of evolution that occur during the transmission of viruses has considerable impact on the design of methods for the control of virus diseases.
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