MCB 300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 37: Intracellular Parasite, 16S Ribosomal Rna, Human Genome

• School: University of Illinois
• Department: Molecular and Cell Biology
• Course: MCB 300
• Professor: C Vanderpool

Document Summary

Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites that need to inhabit the host in order to replicate. They are pretty much just genomic information encapsulated by the capsid to prevent degradation. Their genomes are usually smaller than bacterial and eukaryotic. Outnumber every other type of organism that is on the earth. Human genome is 8% viral in origin. All of our cells are infected with viruses. There isn"t an equivalent of 16s rrna for viruses so that means that it is harder to group viruses together by their dna and figure out lineages. Can do it by sequencing a protein and then extrapolating the dna sequence of that protein. Lyse the cell to release more viruses. There is a nucleocapsid structure that contains the nucleic acid and the capsid. Have the host plasma membrane on them. Do this by budding out of the host cell.