| Description | A switch in the host range specificity occurs in some bacterial viruses through massive sequence variation of their host-binding receptor. Sequence variation can be induced by site-specific inversion of a DNA segment in their genome or by a diversity-generating retroelement. Inversion is catalyzed by a specific recombinase called invertase and consists of a reciprocal recombination event within two inverted repeats present in the viral genome that leads to the alternate expression of two different sets of genes involved in tail fiber biosynthesis. Mu-like viruses and P1-like viruses, for example, encode a recombinase responsible for the switch in the targeted host Diversity-generating retroelements (DGR) like in BPP-1 virus also allow tropism switching by creating a mutant copy of an invariant DNA template repeat by transcription and reverse transcription and introducing this mutated sequence in the receptor-binding protein sequence |
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