What is a Virus ?

Score one for Team Nonliving: After American biochemist Wendell Stanley purified the tobacco mosaic virus into needlelike crystals of protein, he won a 1946 Nobel Prize—awarded in chemistry, not medicine.

Fossils of Cyanobacteria are kept in 3.2 billion year old rock in the Palaeobotany Institute of Lucknow.

Virus comes from the Latin word for “poison” or “slimy liquid,” an apt descriptor for the bug that causes flu and the common cold.

Bacteriophage was independently discovered by Frederick W. Twort in Great Britain (1915) and Felix d Herelle in France (1917). Those viruses that enter the bacteria and multiply or group of viruses that infect bacteria are called bacteriophages or bacteriophage.

In 1992 scientists tracking a pneumonia outbreak in England found a massive new kind of virus lurking within an amoeba inside a cooling tower. It was so large and complex, they initially assumed it was a bacterium.

Protein coat of the virus is called capsid.

That über-virus is now called Mimivirus, so named because it mimics bacteria and because French biologist Didier Raoult, who helped sequence its genome, fondly recalled his father telling the story of “Mimi the Amoeba.”

Bawden and Darlington reported that viruses are made up of nucleoprotein.

Mimivirus contains more than 900 genes, which encode proteins that all other viruses manage to do without. Its genome is twice as big as that of any other known virus and bigger than that of many bacteria.

Viroids are small pathogens of the virus. They do not contain protein core similar to viruses. Only the compositions of Viroids that are made up of RNA are called metaviruses.

Mamavirus, closely related to Mimivirus but even bigger, also turned up inside an amoeba in a Paris cooling tower. (Maybe somebody should clean those towers.)

Cyanobacteria are considered to be the first photosynthetic organisms.

Amoebas turn out to be great places to seek out new viruses. They like to swallow big things and so serve as a kind of mixing bowl where viruses and bacteria can swap genes.

Single-stranded RNA is found in the virus of rabies or hydrophobia.

Viruses are already known to infect animals, plants, fungi, protozoa, archaea, and bacteria. Sputnik and Mamavirus suggest that they can infect other viruses, too.

Double-stranded DNA is found in the small Pox virus.

In fact, scratch the whole concept of “us versus them.” Half of all human DNA originally came from viruses, which infected and embedded themselves in our ancestors’ egg and sperm cells.

Most of those embedded viruses are now extinct, but in 2005 French researchers applied for permission to resurrect one of them. Some scientists objected, saying the resurrected virus could go on a rampage; the research ministry approved the project.

Do you know that the infectious part of the virus is nucleic acid?

Stanley is the first to separate the virus as a crystal.

Antibiotics do not affect viruses because viruses do not have metabolic processes of their own and they always live in the host cells, so the toxic effects of antibiotics occur only to the host cell.

Apocalypse Not: The virus, dubbed Phoenix, was a dud.
Then again, other viral relics in our genomes may play a role in autoimmune diseases and certain cancers.

Do you know that the common cold is caused by Rhinovirus.

Some viral proteins do good. They may have kept your mother’s immune system from attacking you in utero, for instance.

A virus called HTLV, which has coevolved with humans for thousands of years, is being used to uncover prehistoric migration patterns. Its modern distribution suggests that Japanese sailors were the first people to reach the Americas, millennia before Siberians wandered across the Bering Strait.