Fig. 6

Host range measured by infected host population’s genetic diversity under different conditions. The first column is the gene regulatory network diversity, the second column is the phenotype diversity and the last column is the receptor protein sequence diversity. Viruses become specialists when receptor binding complexity (L) increases (a, b, c), survival rate for offspring from infected parents (k _I ) decreases (d, e, f) and amino acid matching threshold for protein binding (ϵ _seqM ) decreases (g, h, i). For low ϵ _seqM and k _I , population dynamics generally follows that shown in Additional file 2: Figure S1 b. Hence, in d ~ i) we considered all 100 simulations for measuring the genetic diversity