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Copyright © 2008 Han et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. Homologous recombination is unlikely to play a major role in influenza B virus evolution Guan-Zhu Han,  #1,2 Xi-Ping Liu,#2 and Si-Shen Li11National Key Laboratory of Crop Biology, College of Agronomy, Shandong Agricultural University, Tai'an 271018, China 2College of Life Science, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250014, China Corresponding author.#Contributed equally. Guan-Zhu Han: hanguanzhu/at/yahoo.com; Xi-Ping Liu: lixiping1988/at/yahoo.com.cn; Si-Shen Li: ssli/at/sdau.edu.cn Received April 10, 2008; Accepted May 27, 2008. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. | ||||
Abstract Influenza B viruses cause a significant amount of morbidity and mortality. The occurrence of homologous recombination in influenza viruses is controversial. To determine the extent of homologous recombination in influenza B viruses, recombination analyses of 2,650 sequences representing all eight segments of the influenza B viruses were carried out. Only four sequences were indentified as putative recombinants, which were verified using phylogenetic methods. However, the mosaics detected here were much likely to represent cases of laboratory-generated artificial recombinants. As in other myxoviruses, it is unlikely that homologous recombination plays a major role in influenza B virus evolution. | ||||
