Heard about Viruses getting sick???
True even viruses get sick and that too by another virus attack.Viruses are known to infect bacteria and make them sick but this for the first report of virus infecting another.Jean-Michel Claverie, a virologist at the CNRS UPR laboratories in Marseilles has shown that Sputnik (named after first man made satellite ) infects a new strain of giant virus which was isolated from a cooling tower in Paris.Bernard La Scola and other members from the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille published in the journal Nature that Sputnik was able to achieve a remarkable degree of gene mixing by “looting” genes from its host virus .
This finding by Claverie group will help us to understand how Viruses mutate so quickly,owing to which designing of drugs and vaccines against them is so difficult.It also lends support to the argument that viruses are true living organisms, despite lacking cells.
“There’s no doubt this is a living organism. The fact that it can get sick makes it more alive,” –Jean-Michel Claverie
References
1. La Scola, B. et al. Nature doi:10.1038/nature07218 (2008).
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