Figure 1.

An illustration of (A) stamping machine replication, and (B) geometric genome replication. Yellow bars represent genomes, colored boxes represent mutations. In stamping machine replication, a single virus genome is used as the template for replication, leading to linear accumulation of mutations. With geometric genome replication, progeny strands can become templates for replication themselves, and thus there is an exponential increase in the number of mutations in the genomes of newly synthesized virions.