title: Virus replication as a phenotypic version of polynucleotide evolution.
abstract: In this paper, we revisit and adapt to viral evolution an approach based on the theory of branching process advanced by Demetrius et al. (Bull. Math. Biol. 46:239-262, 1985), in their study of polynucleotide evolution. By taking into account beneficial effects, we obtain a non-trivial multivariate generalization of their single-type branching process model. Perturbative techniques allows us to obtain analytical asymptotic expressions for the main global parameters of the model, which lead to the following rigorous results: (i) a new criterion for "no sure extinction", (ii) a generalization and proof, for this particular class of models, of the lethal mutagenesis criterion proposed by Bull et al. (J. Virol. 18:2930-2939, 2007), (iii) a new proposal for the notion of relaxation time with a quantitative prescription for its evaluation, (iv) the quantitative description of the evolution of the expected values in four distinct "stages": extinction threshold, lethal mutagenesis, stationary "equilibrium", and transient. Finally, based on these quantitative results, we are able to draw some qualitative conclusions.
authors: Departamento de Informática em Saúde, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil. fernando.antoneli@unifesp.br
authors: Fernando
authors: F
authors: Antoneli
authors: Francisco
authors: F
authors: Bosco
authors: Diogo
authors: D
authors: Castro
authors: Luiz Mario
authors: LM
authors: Janini
mesh_terms: D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D008957:Models, Genetic; D011119:Polynucleotides / Q000235:genetics*; D013269:Stochastic Processes; D014779:Virus Replication / Q000235:genetics*
chemical_list: D011119:Polynucleotides