Abstract
Although viral outbreaks and pandemics have plagued humans and other organisms for billions of years, such events are not only still impossible to predict, but the ultimate reasons why outbreaks happen are not understood. Based on recent viral outbreaks and pandemics (Ebola, Zika and Influenza), we searched for a common denominator to these events, positing that the genome of outbreak viruses is far from an evolutionary equilibrium, which is ultimately maintained by a dense network of correlated substitutions. We show here that genes of outbreak viruses are characterised by destabilised correlation networks, a result that might improve outbreak surveillance.
Copyright
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.