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Influenza A virus (IAV) rapidly evolves between seasons, enabling the virus to reinfect previously infected hosts. To inform vaccine strain selection, considerable research has therefore focused on predicting the genetic and antigenic evolution of influenza's hemagglutinin protein, the major target of our immune response. In contrast, little attention has been placed on characterizing the evolutionary dynamics of other components of influenza's genomic diversity. This genomic diversity encompasses fully-infectious particles, semi-infectious particles that express an incomplete set of essential viral genes, and defective interfering particles (DIPs) that interfere with the replication of the wild-type IAV. Understanding the evolutionary dynamics of DIPs is important given recent work showing that IAV strains can differ in their rates of DIP generation and that these differences affect the severity of infection outcome. Here, we …