Phages, Quasispecies, and Spillovers: A Narrative Review of Microbiology and Virology's Ecology of Emergence
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Microbiology and virology's modern shape is an ecology: phages negotiating with bacteria, RNA viruses drifting as quasispecies, and pathogens crossing species boundaries into the human crowd. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that ecology. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the phage foundations, in which d'Herelle's bacteriophage, Hershey and Chase's experiment, Luria and Delbrueck's fluctuation analysis, Benzer's fine structure, and Adams's monograph made the virus both biology's tool and its paradigm of variation; the quasispecies turn, in which Eigen's selforganization theory and Domingo's sequence heterogeneity measurements rebuilt the RNA virus as a mutant cloud whose selection acts on ensembles rather than clones; and the emergence frame, in which Morse's emerging viruses, Anderson and May's dynamics, Woolhouse's host-range analysis, Webster's influenza ecology, and de Wit's coronavirus insights assembled the modern account of how pathogens spill over, adapt, and spread. It is concluded that the three literatures are one argument: viruses are populations in ecological motion, and emergence --- in the phage plaque, the quasispecies cloud, and the zoonotic spillover --- is not an exception but the discipline's central phenomenon, whose study transformed microbiology from catalog to dynamics.
Authors: Revista, Zen, BIOLOGY, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Genetics
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204784989