On Jan 24, 2012, at 10:31 PM, Bart Hazes wrote: > For some RNA viruses the rate of mutation is so high that they basically > sample a flat region of the fitness-landscape. If you could take two > individual viruses out of this sample to establish two independent infections > than over time each will start to re-sample the same flat landscape. In other > words, there is not a single unique, or predominant, sequence that represents > the species but a pool of "near-equal" fitness variants. > > To some extend I feel that this is always the case but for "normal" organisms > the sampling rate of fitness space is slow and genetic differences between > individuals are dominated by mutations passed down by vertical descend. In > contrast, if you sequence two viruses from the above two infections there > genetic distance will be similar to the genetic distances between individuals > within a single infection.
This way of looking at species is described in a paper I once presented in a journal club. The work is computer based and describes putting an evolutionary algorithm in control of its own mutation rate. Its not my field, but I found the paper very approachable and extremely interesting. Emergence of species in evolutionary “simulated annealing”: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/1869.full Saul Hazledine
