Sendai virus intra-host population dynamics and host immunocompetence influence viral virulence during in vivo passage

Peña, José; Chen-Harris, Haiyin; Allen, Jonathan E.; Hwang, Mona; Elsheikh, Maher; Mabery, Shalini; Bielefeldt-Ohmann, Helle; Zemla, Adam T.; Bowen, Richard A.; Borucki, Monica K.

Novel human viral pathogens are emerging with increasing frequency, however the mechanisms of viral adaptation to a new host are not well understood (Morse, et al. 2012; Anthony et al. 2013) . The majority of these pathogens have an animal reservoir and an RNA genome. RNA viruses have a highly error-V C The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact [e-mail] prone polymerase used for genome replication, and individual RNA genomes within a species generally differ by many nucleotides (nts) from the consensus (average) genome sequence. Because of this, the term 'quasispecies' is often used to describe the mutant spectra of viral genomes that constitute an RNA viral species (Domingo and Holland 1997) . Recent studies indicate that intra-host viral population diversity may be a prerequisite for a virulent infection (Vignuzzi, et al. 2006; Kuss, Etheredge, and Pfeiffer, 2008; Gutié rrez, Michalakis, and Blanc 2012) although the nature of the infection (acute versus chronic) and viral lifecycle (i.e. vector-borne viruses) also influence the role of intra-host viral diversity in infection outcome (Weaver, Rico-Hesse, and Scott 1992; Jerzak, et al. 2007; Andersen et al. 2015) .