Viruses must mutate to survive in the face of attack by their host's immune system. A new model suggests that the viral mutation rate is optimized in an evolutionary trade-off between adaptability and genomic integrity.
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Bonhoeffer, S., Sniegowski, P. The importance of being erroneous. Nature 420, 367–369 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/420367a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/420367a