∞ generated and posted on 2020.12.17 ∞
Depending on type, can be closed circular, linear, segmented or consist of single-stranded or double-stranded DNA or RNA.
| Perhaps the most unusual thing about viruses, as forms of life, is the crazy diversity of their genomes versus the comparatively boring dsDNA genomes of cellular organisms. |
The genomes of viruses display far more structural diversity than the genomes of cellular organisms, which instead are all double stranded and all DNA.
Though bacterial chromosomes tend to be closed circular, while genomes of eukaryotes tend to be segmented (i.e., broken up into more than one chromosome), generally virus genomes are both linear and not segmented.
See also dsDNA, ssDNA, dsRNA, ssRNA, monopartite, bipartite, tripartite, and circular permutation.
The following videos are a pretty nice and relatively fast overviews of the diversity of virus genome types, the first is somewhat shorter: