The DOI matches its Crossref record; 94 of the 94 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Viral Mutation Rates
Open accessAbstract
Accurate estimates of virus mutation rates are important to understand the evolution of the viruses and to combat them. However, methods of estimation are varied and often complex. Here, we critically review over 40 original studies and establish criteria to facilitate comparative analyses. The mutation rates of 23 viruses are presented as substitutions per nucleotide per cell infection (s/n/c) and corrected for selection bias where necessary, using a new statistical method. The resulting rates range from 10 −8 to10 −6 s/n/c for DNA viruses and from 10 −6 to 10 −4 s/n/c for RNA viruses. Similar to what has been shown previously for DNA viruses, there appears to be a negative correlation between mutation rate and genome size among RNA viruses, but this result requires further experimental testing. Contrary to some suggestions, the mutation rate of retroviruses is not lower than that of other RNA viruses. We also show that nucleotide substitutions are on average four times more common than insertions/deletions (indels). Finally, we provide estimates of the mutation rate per nucleotide per strand copying, which tends to be lower than that per cell infection because some viruses undergo several rounds of copying per cell, particularly double-stranded DNA viruses. A regularly updated virus mutation rate data set will be available at www.uv.es/rsanjuan/virmut .
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Citations
Cites
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Cited by
Markov, P. V., Ghafari, M., Beer, M., Lythgoe, K., Simmonds, P., Stilianakis, N. I., & Katzourakis, A. (2023) · Nature Reviews Microbiology · doi:10.1038/s41579-023-00878-2 · Cited by 1,179
Kieft, K., Zhou, Z., & Anantharaman, K. (2020) · Microbiome · doi:10.1186/s40168-020-00867-0 · Cited by 1,123
Domingo, E., Sheldon, J., & Perales, C. (2012) · Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews · doi:10.1128/mmbr.05023-11 · Cited by 1,009
SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) by the numbers
Bar-On, Y. M., Flamholz, A., Phillips, R., & Milo, R. (2020) · eLife · doi:10.7554/elife.57309 · Cited by 962
Liu, Z., VanBlargan, L. A., Bloyet, L.-M., Rothlauf, P. W., Chen, R. E., Stumpf, S., Zhao, H., Errico, J. M., Theel, E. S., Liebeskind, M. J., et al. (2021) · Cell Host & Microbe · doi:10.1016/j.chom.2021.01.014 · Cited by 725
“The intrinsically high error rates of viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerases (RdRp) result in the stochastic introduction of mutations during viral genome replication with substitutions approaching a nucleotide change per genome for each round of replication (Sanjuán et al., 2010).”
Background
Metadata
- Authors
- Sanjuán, R., Nebot, M. R., Chirico, N., Mansky, L. M., & Belshaw, R.
- Venue
- Journal of Virology
- Publisher
- American Society for Microbiology
- Published
- 2010-10
- Volume
- 84
- Issue
- 19
- Pages
- 9733-9748
- ISSN
- 0022-538X (ISSN-L)
- 1098-5514
- OpenAlex
- W2145605402
- Cited by
- 1,246
- References
- 94
- FWCI
- 22.80
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Viral Mutation Rates. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1128/jvi.00694-10
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- Sanjuán, R., Nebot, M. R., Chirico, N., Mansky, L. M., & Belshaw, R. (2010). Viral Mutation Rates. Journal of Virology. https://doi.org/10.1128/jvi.00694-10
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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