[GuiA]

That's pretty amazing. I'm guessing DNA compactness is a survival advantage for viruses, and that's how this emerged? Is gene overlap common in other species?

[jonmrodriguez]

Gene overlap is extremely rare actually! When phiX174 was first discovered, some researchers wondered if such a complexly intertwined system could even have evolved naturally, or if it might suggest that the virus was hand-engineered: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1979Icar...38..148Y

[wamatt]

I would think the opposite may be true, given that compressed information tends to be more sensitive to error, than uncompressed.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Redundancy helps resistance to error, yeah. This thing could be quite easily damaged in transmission.