Emerging Diseases as Complex Adaptive Systems/Pilot

摘要

We designed and tested a computational model of emerging viruses that simulatesthe evolution of real biological viruses. Knowledge of viral molecular replication mechanisms was used to instruct the development of this genetic algorithm-based C language 'Virtual Virus' (vW). The model consists of populations of hundreds to thousands of variable length virtual virus genomes that replicate, mutate, recombine, and evolve. Each virus genome is composed of an artificial polynucleotide string in which arbitrary 'nucleotide' triplets encode English letters rather than amino acids, and in which sequences are translated into words or phrases, rather than into polypeptides or proteins. The