A billion years arms-race between viruses, virophages and eukaryotes

  1. Department of Biology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Peer review process

Not revised: This Reviewed Preprint includes the authors’ original preprint (without revision), an eLife assessment, and public reviews.

Read more about eLife’s peer review process.

Editors

  • Reviewing Editor
    Antonis Rokas
    Vanderbilt University, Nashville, United States of America
  • Senior Editor
    Christian Landry
    Université Laval, Québec, Canada

Public Review:

Barreat and Katzourakis analyze the evolutionary history of eukaryotic viruses (and related mobile elements) in the Bamfordvirae kingdom, and discuss potential scenarios regarding the origin of different viral taxa in this group. This version of their manuscript includes a larger number of sequences to better represent diversity in these viral groups, and explored new evolutionary scenarios, including a "virophage-first" hypothesis now presented as the one best supported by phylogenetic analyses. The authors also present compelling analyses suggesting that the "nuclear escape" hypothesis in which these different viral groups separately "escaped" from nuclear (integrated) elements is not consistent with the current genomic and phylogenetic information available.

This work is thus an important step in our collective understanding of the ancient evolutionary history of eukaryotic viruses, and more generally of the constraints and main drivers of virus evolution.

  1. Howard Hughes Medical Institute
  2. Wellcome Trust
  3. Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
  4. Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation