Thermostable variants are not generally represented in foot-and-mouth disease virus quasispecies.

A severe limitation to fully realize the dramatic potential for adaptation of RNA virus quasispecies may occur if mutations in vast regions of the sequence space of virus genomes lead to significant decreases in biological fitness. In this study the detection and selection by heat of thermostable variants from different foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) populations were attempted, in order to explore whether FMDV may generally accept a substantial increase in thermostability without compromising its infectivity. The results obtained with both uncloned and cloned populations of different serotypes, recovered from cytolytic or persistent infections and subjected to either very few passages or extensive passaging in cells, indicate that the presence of thermostable virus variants, even in small proportions, is not a general feature of FMDV quasispecies. This suggests that no substantial increase in the thermostability of FMDV may readily occur without a negative effect on viral function.