Taxonomy and phylogeny of papillomaviruses: an overview and recent developments.

For more than 30 years, papillomaviruses are standing in the center of medical and molecular interest as they cause several important cancers in humans. Research of the sheer unlimited number of different papillomavirus genomes, their host specificity and slow mutation rate is an important a branch of these efforts and has led to fascinating insight into the phylogeny of a virus family that can be traced back for several 100 million years.