Multipartite is a class of
virus
A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea.
Since Dmitri Ivanovsk ...
that have segmented nucleic acid genomes, with each segment of the genome enclosed in a separate viral particle. Only a few
ssDNA viruses have multipartite genomes, but a lot more RNA viruses have multipartite genomes.
[http://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~mcclean/plsc411/viral-genome-structures-lecture-and-overheads.pdf ] An advantage of multipartite genome is its ability to synthesize multiple
mRNA
In molecular biology, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a single-stranded molecule of RNA that corresponds to the genetic sequence of a gene, and is read by a ribosome in the process of synthesizing a protein.
mRNA is created during the ...
strands to avoid the cellular constraint of
monocistronic
A cistron is an alternative term for "gene". The word cistron is used to emphasize that genes exhibit a specific behavior in a cis-trans test; distinct positions (or loci) within a genome are cistronic.
History
The words ''cistron'' and ''gene ...
ity. Until recently, it was not known how multipartite viruses could efficiently infect a single cell with all the segments that comprise their genome simultaneously, which was thought to be necessary for replication. It has since been shown that the segments typically do not infect the same cell. Rather, segments accumulate in different cells and the viral system functions through exchange of material between cells.
Thus, multipartite viruses are not localized in space but rather more like a distributed network of chemical reactions. In this sense, they are an even further departure from other organisms than monopartite viruses. Multipartite viruses represent 35-40% of the viral genera and families that have been described in plants and fungi, but otherwise appear to be rare.
See also
Monopartite
Monopartite refers to the class of genome that is presented in the genome of the virus. As opposed to multipartite
Multipartite is a class of virus that have segmented nucleic acid genomes, with each segment of the genome enclosed in a separate vi ...
References
Genomics
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