On the stability of sequences inserted into viral genomes

Willemsen, Anouk; Zwart, Mark P

Viruses genera covered in relevant studies Conclusions of this review All viruses • Inserted sequences are often unstable and rapidly lost upon passaging of an engineered virus • The position at which a sequence is integrated in the genome can be important for stability • Sequence stability is not an intrinsic property of genomes because demographic parameters, such as population size and bottleneck size, can have important effects on sequence stability • The multiplicity of cellular infection affects sequence stability, and can in some cases directly affect whether there is selection for deletion variants • Deletions are not the only class of mutations that can reduce the cost of inserted sequences, although they are the most common I: dsDNA