BIOL 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 51: Heredity, Encephalitis, Ebola Virus Disease
16 Jun 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Viruses can"t propel themselves, can"t grow, can"t break down organic matter and store its energy, and don"t have a cellular structure. Most biologists in the past have thought that viruses are not alive. Viruses do have a complex internal organization, they base their heredity on nucleic acids, they can sense signals from the environment and react to them, and they certainly can evolve. By the way, the latin word virus means poison. They always have either dna or rna (but usually not both) enclosed in a protein shell called a capsid. The only way they can reproduce is by infecting a host cell and hijacking its machinery to make new viruses. Viruses cannot be cultured in a cell-free medium, and they cannot break down organic matter and store its energy. On the other hand, they can be crystalized and stored on a shelf as if they were a big molecule like a protein.
