In this video, we're going to introduce our map of the lesson on animal virus synthesis and replication, which is actually down below right here. And so what's really important to note is that animal viruses can actually have many different types of genomes. And these different types of genomes allow for variations in viral synthesis and replication. As we move forward in our course, we're going to talk about all of the different types of viral genomes, and we're going to talk about how those viral genomes allow for variations in viral synthesis and replication. Really what we're saying here is that the mechanism of viral synthesis and replication depends on the type of viral genome. Notice our map down below is really a map of the animal virus genome types.
Animal virus genomes can be broken up into 3 major groups. The first group over here on the far left are going to be the DNA viruses, which of course are going to be viruses that have a DNA genome, either a plus minus dsDNA genome, where "plus minus" and "ds" are just referring to the fact that it is a double-stranded DNA molecule that we'll get to talk more about later in our course. The "ds" here stands for double-stranded. As you can see here, we have a double-stranded DNA molecule. Or the DNA virus could have a single-stranded DNA genome or a plus ssDNA where the "ss" here stands for single stranded. Once again, we'll be able to talk more about these DNA virus genomes later in our course as we move forward.
Now the second major group of animal virus genomes are going to be the RNA viruses. RNA viruses of course are going to have an RNA genome. It could either be a plus ssRNA genome or a plus single-stranded RNA genome where the "ss" is single stranded as you see here. It could also be a minus ssRNA genome, where again the "ss" stands for single stranded. We'll differentiate between the plus and the minus later in our course as we move forward. Or the RNA virus could have a plus minus dsRNA, where, again, the "ds" is double-stranded RNA, which is very strange and unique, but it can occur in some viruses. Once again, we'll get to talk more about this later in our course.
Last but not least, the third group of animal virus genomes that we're going to talk about are the reverse transcribing viruses, which have the ability to reverse transcribe. We'll get to talk more about what that means and more details about those genomes as we move forward in our course. But for now, this here concludes our brief lesson on our map of the lesson on animal virus synthesis and replication. We're going to cover this map by following the leftmost branches first. We'll talk about the DNA viruses first, then we'll talk about the RNA viruses, and then last but not least, we'll talk about the reverse transcribing viruses. I'll see you all in our next video.