Viruses Can Scatter Their Genes Among Cells and Reassemble

Not only are some viruses split into multiple segments that infect host cells separately, but as researchers in France have now discovered, those fractured viruses can flourish with their genomes scattered like puzzle pieces across a multitude of host cells. “You can get all of the necessary gene products together to produce new viruses in a cell that doesn’t actually have all the gene segments in it,” explained Christopher Brooke, a virologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. By tagging two viral segments at a time with different colored fluorescent probes, the team could see that the full complement of viral segments was absent from the vast majority of individual host plant cells they examined.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org