Читать книгу Principles of Virology - Jane Flint, S. Jane Flint - Страница 51

Lwoff, Robert Horne, and Paul Tournier, in 1962, advanced a comprehensive scheme for the classification of all viruses under the classical Linnaean hierarchical system consisting of phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. Although a subsequently formed international committee on the nomenclature of viruses did not adopt this system in toto, its designation of orders, families, genera, and species is used for the classification of animal viruses.

One of the most important principles embodied in the system advanced by Lwoff and his colleagues was that viruses should be grouped according to their shared properties rather than those of the cells or organisms they infect. A second principle was a focus on the nature of the nucleic acid genome as the primary criterion for classification. The importance of the genome had become clear when it was inferred from the Hershey-Chase experiment that viral nucleic acid alone can be infectious (Box 1.5). Four characteristics are used in the taxonomic classification of all viruses: