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Updated: Jul 18, 2026

Isolation of Fidelity Variants of RNA Viruses and Characterization of Virus Mutation Frequency
Published on: June 16, 2011
Exponential fitness gains of RNA virus populations are limited by bottleneck effects
I S Novella1, J Quer, E Domingo
1Department of Biology and Center for Molecular Genetics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0116, USA. isabel@mco.edu
Abstract:
Fitness is a parameter that quantitatively measures adaptation of a virus to a given environment. We have previously reported exponential fitness gains of large populations of vesicular stomatitis virus replicating in a constant environment (I. S. Novella et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 92:5841-5844, 1995). In this paper, we report that during long-term passage of such large viral populations, fitness values reached a high-fitness plateau during which stochastic fitness variations were observed. This effect appears likely to be due to bottleneck effects on very high fitness populations.
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