Coevolution between simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and virus genome size

Abstract

Abstract Background Relationship between the level of repetitiveness in genomic sequence and genome size has been investigated by making use of complete prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes, but relevant studies have been rarely made in virus genomes. Results In this study, a total of 257 viruses were examined, which cover 90% of genera. The results showed that simple sequence repeats (SSRs) is strongly, positively and significantly correlated with genome size. Certain repeat class is distributed in a certain range of genome sequence length. Mono-, di- and tri- repeats are widely distributed in all virus genomes, tetra- SSRs as a common component consist in genomes which more than 100 kb in size; in the range of genome Conclusions We conducted this research standing on the height of the whole virus. We concluded that genome size is an important factor in affecting the occurrence of SSRs; hosts are also responsible for the variances of SSRs content to a certain degree.

Keywords

• Simple sequence repeats
• Microsatellite
• Genome size
• Virus genomes
• Evolution