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Viruses Infected By Viruses
SpaceAdmiral writes "Scientists have discovered a virus that can infect another virus. The fact that viruses can essentially get sick may change the debate over whether they are alive or not. Check out Nature for a slightly more technical article about the 'virophage.'"
I'm pretty sure they can reproduce, else there would be no risk of spreading them and they'd all die out soon after coming into being.
in fact Viruses have been linked to cancer. Human Pamplona Virus (HPV) is thought to be solely responsible for cases of cervical cancer. Hence the push to get them all vaccinated at a young age before they start having sex.
The reason your school taught you that is because the definition of living usually taught in schools includes such characteristics as:
just to name a few. Viruses don't possess any metabolic function (they use the host cells hijacked machinery), they don't grow (once created, they are essentially static objects until they bump into a cell), and they have no means of independent reproduction (again, the hijacked cells reproduce the virus).
On the other hand, many people simplify the definition of life to solely the ability to reproduce (independently or not), which makes viruses alive, but also makes prions alive, and makes it fairly easy for humans to "create life" in the form of self-reproducing machines.
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Obligatory link to an old paper: Eugene H. Spafford. Computer viruses as artificial life. Artificial Life, 1(3):249-265, 1994.
The short answer is "no," but it makes for an interesting read if you have some whiskey to drink while you're reading it.
HTLV-1 causes changes in gene expression resulting in adult t-cell leukemia. This year my advisor had a paper on this very research detailing some of the changes which are involved: http://www.jbc.org/cgi/content/abstract/277/51/49459 basically the idea is that the virus in its attempt to replicate its self using cellular machinery alters the expression of specific genes, Tax, CREB and histones. better explained from my advisor: "HTLV-I Tax functions to short circuit the normal regulation of cell cycle progression by abrogating the need for mitogen stimulation and blocking checkpoint controls, resulting in unregulated initiation of S phase." in other words, the virus kicks out some of the cell regulatory controls that at least in part prevent it from becoming a cancer cell.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I believe you meant papilloma (a virus that induces warts and similar growths), not Pamplona (a town where you can be an idiot and get yourself gored by a bull).
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Summary is totally misleading. The story isn't about viruses "getting sick" - it's about a certain type of satellite virus (not new) that can only infect a host that is already infected by another virus. Essentially the satellite virus is competing with the original virus for metabolites. The discovery here is that for the first time a satellite virus is competing for these resources to such an extent that it is actually destroying the original virus.
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
Yes. Mules cannot reproduce. The distinctions between species are based on the production of offspring which can reproduce to the nth generation.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
Am I the only one that thinks that they replicate by way of using the the host tissue cells by tricking it to make duplicates?
Just to be clear, what I listed was only a subset of the definition. If you want a more formal definition, there is a decent one here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Definitions
Fire for instance, fails on homeostasis (no regulation of state to maintain equilibrium), organization (no cell structure; while I don't think we should require cellular structure, you do need some organizational principle), and no adaptation.
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Because the statement that A = A is tautological, but the statement that A = B is not. The truth of the former conveys no information, but the truth of the latter does. To put it like Frege puts it, "The morning star is the morning star" is a trivial statement, but "The morning star is an evening star" is an astronomical discovery.
Whiskey is the crap left over when all the whisky is gone.
No more Laphroaig? Powers'll do ya.
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