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According to my school biology textbook and also Wikipedia, hepatitis B is the only Hepatitis virus to possess partially double-stranded DNA. I found an image from here partially double-stranded

What is the reason for the partially double-stranded DNA?

(It seems that it can be triple-stranded as well.)

I found this information in this research about duck hepatitis B virus

Similar to classical retroviruses, viral assembly begins with the formation of intracellular nucleocapsid particles that specifically package the pgRNA. However, all hepadnaviruses undergo a maturation phase during their morphogenesis that is characterized by the reverse transcription of the pgRNA prior to membrane envelopment and secretion as extracellular virions, rather than subsequent to entry into new target cells, as is the case for classical retroviruses (for a review, see reference 20). Thus, secreted hepadnaviral virions contain only the “mature” ds DNA, whereas intracellular pools of nucleocapsids contain nucleic acid species from all the intermediate stages of reverse transcription ranging from only pgRNA to single (minus)-stranded (ss) DNA as well as ds DNA, a fundamental observation made by Summers and Mason 2 decades ago (22)

  • What is the special advantage of having such a genome?

  • are there any other organisms with partially double stranded DNA or partially double stranded RNA as well?

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    $\begingroup$ I've edited your question slightly. "Reason for" is the way to express your question. ("What's the use of" is a vernacular expression implying that something has no function.) $\endgroup$
    – David
    Oct 9, 2020 at 17:53
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    $\begingroup$ I would recommend removing the second question. Hepatitis viruses with different genome structures are not closely related so there is no reason to expect that they would have similar structures. $\endgroup$
    – tyersome
    Oct 9, 2020 at 18:58

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