Sources
Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web.
Submit a site - Become an editor
Wikipedia. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Are you an expert in this subject? Join the discussion and share your knowledge at Wikipedia.org.
Baltimore classification
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Baltimore classification is a classification system which groups viruses into families depending on their type of genome (DNA, RNA, single-stranded (ss), double-stranded (ds) etc.) and their method of replication.
It was created by the American biologist David Baltimore and is the preferred way of classifying viruses today. Other classifications are determined by the type of disease the virus causes (localised, disseminated, persistent, etc.) or its morphology (spherical, dodecahedral, etc.). Neither are particularly satisfactory because very different viruses will sometimes cause the same disease (e.g. hepatitis), and viruses with similar structures will often behave very differently (what's more, the precise structure of viruses is often difficult to determine under the microscope).
Classifying viruses according to their genome means that those in a given category will all behave in much the same way, which offers some indication of how to proceed with further research.
- Type I: dsDNA viruses (Herpesviridae, Poxviridae, Adenoviridae and Papovaviridae)
- Type II: ssDNA viruses (Circoviridae and Parvoviridae)
- Type III: dsRNA viruses (Reoviridae and Birnaviridae)
- Type IV: positive sense ssRNA viruses (Astroviridae, Caliciviridae, Coronaviridae, Flaviviridae, Picornaviridae, Arteriviridae and Togaviridae)
- Type V: negative sense ssRNA viruses (Arenaviridae, Orthomyxoviridae, Paramyxoviridae, Bunyaviridae and Rhabdoviridae)
- Type VI: diploid ssRNA viruses (Reverse transcriptase) (Retroviridae)
- Type VII: (dsDNA viruses with ssRNA intermediates (Reverse transcriptase)(Hepadnaviridae)
 |
This virus-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |