Currently, it is becoming increasingly clear that RNA recombination plays a very complex role in a virus' life cycle. Not only does it permit the exchange of genetic material between viruses (3, 4, 22) , frequent homologous crossovers between molecules representing the same segment of the virus genome also stabilize genetic information (48) . Moreover, here we showed that homologous and non-homologous recombination might control the organization of the virus genome by removing direct or inverted repeats, which affect the virus' ability to replicate or accumulate in the infected cells. Interestingly, we observed that complementary sequences are more effectively deleted than homologous ones. It seems that some of the latter can prevail in the viral genome probably due to their compact stable structure that prevents recombination events.