Virus as Populations

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.

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.

1. Introduction to Virus Origins and Their Role in Biological Evolution2. Molecular Basis of Genetic Variation of Viruses 3. Darwinian Principles Acting on Highly Mutable Viruses4. Dynamics of Virus Populations and Their Hosts5. Viral Fitness as a Measure of Adaptation 6. Virus Population Dynamics Examined with Experimental Model Systems 7. Long-term Virus Evolution in Nature8. Quasispecies Dynamics in Disease Prevention and Control9. Trends in Antiviral Strategies10. Collective Population Effects in Non-Viral Systems