Retrovirus recombination depends on the length of sequence identity and is not error prone

Abstract excerpt

Retroviruses, as a result of the presence of two identical genomic RNA molecules in their virions, recombine at a high rate. When nonhomologous RNA is present in the dimer RNA molecules, nonhomologous recombination can occur, although the rate is very low, only 0.1% of the rate of essentially homologous recombination (J. Zhang and H. M. Temin, Science 259:234-238, 1993). We found, as is found in naturally...