First evidence of host range expansion in virophages and its potential impact on giant viruses and host cells

Said Mougari; Nisrine Chelkha; Dehia Sahmi-Bounsiar; Fabrizio Di Pinto; Philippe Colson; Jonatas Abrahao; Bernard La Scola

Evolution is an inevitable path for living organisms to adapt to changes in their ecosystem and to explore new environmental niches. In microorganisms, the evolutionary process has been studied in considerable detail. The process seems to be driven by two major factors: genome plasticity and selection 40 . Because of their fast replication and large population sizes, viruses offer an experimental advantage to study the evolutionary process at the laboratory 41 . Although much is known about the process of evolution in bacteriophages and many emerging zoonotic viruses and how they adapt to new hosts, this mechanism is still unclear for virophages and satellite viruses.