Virus as Populations

Virus as Populations: Composition, Complexity, Dynamics, and Biological Implications explains fundamental concepts that arise from regarding viruses as complex populations when replicating in infected hosts. Fundamental phenomena in virus behavior, such as adaptation to changing environments, capacity to produce disease, probability to be transmitted or response to treatment, depend on virus population numbers and in the variations of such population numbers. Concepts such as quasispecies dynamics, mutations rates, viral fitness, the effect of bottleneck events, population numbers in virus transmission and disease emergence, new antiviral strategies such as lethal mutagenesis, and extensions of population heterogeneity to nonviral systems are included. These main concepts of the book are framed in recent observations on general virus diversity derived from metagenomic studies, and current views on the origin of viruses and the role of viruses in the evolution of the biosphere. - Features current views on the key steps in the origin of life and origins of viruses - Includes examples relating ancestral features of viruses with their current adaptive capacity - Explains complex phenomena in an organized and coherent fashion that is easy to comprehend and enjoyable to read - Considers quasispecies as a framework to understand virus adaptability and disease processes

Esteban Domingo studied chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Barcelona, Spain and spent postdoctoral stays at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Zürich. His main interests are the quasispecies structure of RNA viruses and the development of new antiviral strategies. He is presently Professor of Research of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) at Centro de Biología Molecular 'Servero Ochoa' in Madrid.