The Evolution of Hantaviruses

Abstract
Hantaviruses exist in most regions of the world. The many different strains identified thus far have widely divergent roles in human disease and infect a wide range of rodent hosts. The sequence data available for the genomes of these viruses allows us to study indirectly the evolutionary patterns of the hantaviruses. In this paper, we describe relationships among the M genomic segments of hantaviruses, and attempt to relate these to the evolutionary relationships of the virus' rodent hosts.