Talk:Reassortment

Exchange
Is it really an exchange (i.e. a two way street), or should it be a passing of genetic material? Rich  Farmbrough. 20:16, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it is really an exchange. You have a cell in which two different strains have all their genentic material making huge numbers of copies of themselves and self assembling into virons. How can this be anything other than "exchange"? It's not like either of the two strains is actively keeping track of its multiplying RNA strands in the inter-cellular soup of componets. I'm not aware of any factors that cause one strain to self assemble with the other's RNA and not vice-versa. WAS 4.250 21:38, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Fleshing out some social implications of reassortment
This article has a lot of promise, and it would be great to see it get technical while preserving readability by non-scientists. My edit added content from a Web site and cited the source. I hope others can add some more clarification, along with details... Wipfeln 19:45, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Recombination
What is the difference between reassortment and recombination? Should this be explained or mentioned in the article? —Centrx→talk • 22:14, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I've also been wondering about this, and haven't found a good, complete answer. Emw2012 (talk) 17:53, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I just came across a decent answer to this question:
 * Two distinct but not mutually exclusive types of genetic exchange operate in RNA viruses. Reassortment occurs only in multipartite viruses and involves swapping one or more of the discrete RNA molecules that make up the segmented viral genome....Recombination, can occur in either segmented or unsegmented viruses when donor nucleotide sequence is introduced into a single, contiguous acceptor RNA molecule to produce a new RNA containing genetic information from more than one source. - http://www.kiz.ac.cn/summer_course_2009/files/hangz.pdf Emw2012 (talk) 17:59, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Distinguishing recombination and reassortment
I noticed a recent expansion of this article (diff here) and was interested to see it mentioned that chromosomal crossover contributes to reassortment. To my understanding, chromosomal crossover occurs exclusively in genetic recombination; I haven't yet seen a discussion about crossover's role in reassortment in academic journals. Searching for the term "reassortment" in the preview of Albert's Essential Cell Biology provided by Google (see here) shows that reassortment is used in the context of meiosis. I find that a bit surprising, since academic articles I've read about reassortment and recombination note that the two processes are distinct. In any event, it is recombination -- particiularly homologous recombination -- that happens in meiosis. In a very colloquial sense the genetic material shuffling about during meiosis could be said to "reassorted", but I fear that using such language in this article would lead significant misunderstanding among readers. Emw2012 (talk) 18:36, 14 September 2009 (UTC)