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| Chikungunya virus particles emerging from an infected cell - is genetic diversity important to this virus? |
At around 1 mutation per 1,000 - 100,000 nucleotides per round of replication, RNA viruses have the highest mutation rate of anything seen in nature to date. During an infection of a single cell, thousands of new genomes are produced that will go on to make new virus particles; each genome will differ from another at most maybe 10 nucleotides (given an average virus of 10 kilobases in length).