evolutionary role in the development of cellular life, with reverse transcriptase playing a central role. Structure The reverse transcriptase employs a "right hand" structure similar to that found in other viral nucleic acid polymerases. In addition to the transcription function, retroviral reverse transcriptases have a domain belonging to the RNase H family, which is vital to their replication. By degrading the RNA template, it allows the other strand of DNA to be synthesized. Some fragments from the digestion also serve as the primer for the DNA polymerase (either the same enzyme or a host protein), responsible for making the other (plus) strand. Replication fidelity There are three different replication systems during the life cycle of a retrovirus. The first process is the reverse transcriptase synthesis of viral DNA from viral RNA, which then forms newly made complementary DNA strands. The second replication process occurs when host cellular DNA polymerase replicates the integrated viral DNA. Lastly, RNA polymerase II transcribes the proviral DNA into RNA, which will be packed into virions. Mutation can occur during one or all of these replication steps. Reverse transcriptase has a high error rate when transcribing RNA into DNA since, unlike most other DNA polymerases, it has no proofreading ability. This high error rate allows mutations to accumulate at an accelerated rate relative to proofread forms of replication. The commercially available reverse transcriptases produced by Promega are quoted by their manuals as having error rates in the range of 1 in 17,000 bases for AMV and 1 in 30,000 bases for M-MLV. Other than creating single-nucleotide polymorphisms, reverse transcriptases have also been shown to be involved in processes such as transcript fusions, exon shuffling and creating artificial antisense transcripts. It has been speculated that this template switching activity of reverse transcriptase, which can be demonstrated completely in vivo, may have been one of the causes for finding several thousand unannotated transcripts in the genomes of model organisms. Template switching Two RNA genomes are packaged into each retrovirus particle, but, after an infection, each virus generates only one provirus. After infection, reverse transcription is accompanied by template switching between the two genome copies (copy choice recombination). There are two models that suggest why RNA transcriptase switches templates. The first, the forced copy-choice model, proposes that reverse transcriptase changes the RNA template when it encounters a nick, implying that recombination is obligatory to maintaining virus genome integrity. The