Why do viruses exist Veeky Forums and how do we eradicate these little fuckers?

Why do textbooks always depict viruses like OP pic as an archetypal virus. What virus even looks like that thing?

hey now that's not nice they're just trying to live like everyone else

>t. virus
nice try buddy

They are molecular machines basically the before stage of what we call life.

yeah show us a picture of yourself big guy, what does a REAL virus look like

>What virus even looks like that thing?
It's a bacteriophage. I think it was the first virus we were able to see.

nice try, virus guy

the bacteriophage is fucking weird man I don't like it just look at it like what the fuck

It's clearly artificial. It looks like a machine.

I think it's just an artists' rendition. They look more like this in reality... but it's not too far off.

Thanks for the nightmare fuel.

rna in your bloodstream will do literally nothing

>viruses are helpful to the hosts

Pick them off your cell with little tweezers. They're essentially mechanical ticks.

nice try you piece of shit

Unless it's an amount of rna the size of a dog. I think it'll do something then.

>rna the size of a dog
ew

I just imagined something like a combination of The Thing and the t-virus, it mutates any host into a... utility... that just like sprays infected blood all over you, you mutate too, and so on.

>about 8 percent of what we think of as our “human” DNA actually came from viruses

You have to take the crown from the kings and queens of their kingdom

pretty interesting when you think about it.
all humans share signs of some retroviral infection from hundreds of thousands of years ago, the evidence is in our genome

t. virus

Some viruses (called passenger viruses) are harmless and others actually enter into a symbiotic relationship with their hosts (GBV-C infected AIDS patients tend to survive longer than uninfected patients for instance). It's even hypothesized that the nucleus in eukaryotic cells is an endosymbiotic remnant of an ancient virus that was engulfed by a large protozoan, much like mitochondria in eukaryotes or chloroplasts in plants. Evidence for this includes the composition of the nuclear envelope and conserved DNA sequences shared with Mimiviruses.

... so, get the fuck outta here with your virus chauvinism OP!

Also phages represent one of the only viable alternatives to antibiotic therapy for treating bacterial infections in humans. Some Eastern European doctors even prescribe them. Advantages include that they're self-limiting, they exist in the host until the bacteria are eradicated completely (no resistance), they're specific to only one kind of bacteria and don't kill eubacteria like those found in the intestinal flora, and they don't have as many side effects aside from an occasional toxic reaction from all the dead bacteria that the host has to clean.

Viruses are awesome.

Nano machines son.
Once you start getting to virus sized threats it stops being more biology than it is physics.

don't listen to their lies

Fuck, he's onto us

...

nice quads

underrated post

Bacteriophage viruses are very important to the balance of biololgy.

iirc some Eastern Europe actually uses virus "cocktails" that contain specific bacteriophages to treat normally incurable diseases.

Vaccines. Without hosts to infect they get tired and die.

VIDF pls go

dont thet also have cell structure n sheit?

dem books be raciss. We wus mutashions n shiet

>(((life)))
>"us"
insert days_without_virus_tricks.jpeg

Not living. They don't react to environmental changes.

What? Yes they do

kekd

A lot of of our RNA is from viruses.

Viruses could've caused evolution.

Viruses are possibly an offshoot of a protocell and evolved into what they are today.

Viruses likely evolved from contagious vesicles filled with defective DNA that only coded for making for contagious vesicles. Through clonal selection the vesicles containing the DNA that coded for the most effective vesicles and the rest is history.
>RNA
There are DNA viruses, if anything they're more common.

You probably wouldn't doom life, but it is true that a non-insignificant portion of all DNA in all living things was transported to it by a virus.

Collapse under its own weight. Viruses aren't motile either and require another method of transportation than themselves.
>tfw lacking glycoprotein complexes the virus needs to infect me
Get fucked "le ultimate life form"
*absorbed you in a lysosome*

> mfw finally comfy biology thread on Veeky Forums

youtube.com/watch?v=gcYH6se6Cdo

this documentary blew my mind.

it's explains how viruses might of played a role in evolution.

Incoming engineeringfags in 3... 2...

Virus exist because they want to live

>yfw you realize at this moment billions of your cells are desperately trying to destroy that one fragment of nucleotides and an enzyme before it hits the nucleus

I wouldn't worry about it.

Also they are generally useful to transport whatever relatively short rna you want, and thus express the protein you want. They are lovely tools

They are alive. Our definition of "living" is so narrow, for all we know we don't meet the standards of "living" to another species in the galaxy.

> desperately

M8 that shits easy they do it thousand times per minute, even bacteria are expert at that

wouldnt you argue that plants are living?

I mean if they make one mistake that's end, I'd say that's pretty desperate.

They do. The biggest argument against them living organisms is that they cannot reproduce independently.

jej

Mistakes while cleaving rna? You should lack the enzymes to do it, in which case you are in bigger problems altogether than a virus infection

The reactions inside of a cell happen mainly through brownian motion though, there is a chance the genetic material wont be encountered by an enzyme designed to break it down.

There is life in every aspect of this world... Life on Earth can't have life with life growing inside of that life

hah

They have always existed. If you're actually interested look up Transposons & Retrotransposons:

In summary, you have DNA that is able to move around in the string of sequence because they can make copies of themselves, splice themselves out and then insert themselves into a separate region of your genome because they encode for certain protein and are flanked by a distinct repetitive sequence. Transposons have to physically remove themselves to reinsert themselves; retrotransposons just keep making new copies so they increase in numbers quicker. HIV is evolved retrotransposons, they are the exact same shit except they also have a capsid coding sequence that lets them cross membranes and infect other cells. If you look on the other side of evolution, you find parasites of these parasitic DNA that have the flanking sequence that is recognized for cleavage/insertion, but that lack the string that codes for the protein needed for them to splice out and insert themselves. So they pirate their machinery from the retrotransposons.

>TLDR viruses are DNA that found a way to become independent, they evolved off of DNA, you have a fuck ton dormant inside you and you have viruses that are parasites for these viruses

DNA is nothing more than a highly reactive molecule. If it finds a way to self replicate, it will do it until it can't no more. Otherwise it will die off and degrade

Viruses are essential for life, oddly enough.
They were found to play a roll in the development process of a fetus in the womb of sheep, and removing them led to a cease of fetal development...

If you kill ALL the viruses, you kill life as we know it.

DNA isn't that reactive though, it's actually super stable

>A gazelle is staggering along, vomiting blood
>Bulbous protrusions slither around inside it's abdomen
>It's violently rent apart by 50 baseball sized spider-like creatures that skitter into the grasslands

>thinking its just engineers who make fun of biology
Math and physics majors here have the most disdain for you guys.

That's only because it is condensed. If it weren't reactive it couldn't self assemble or replicate

Wait, the way my professor always taught it was that DNA self-assembled because it was thermodynamically favored over reactive single nucleotides or RNA. Is this wrong?

Nah, any reaction that takes place in your body including molecular folding is thermodynamically favored. But the moment regions of DNA decondense promotors will be recognized and a chain reaction of transcription, translation and protein modification will take place. The double helix itself isnt that reactive but it is recognized by transcription factors that assemble into huge ogliomeric structures to carry out transcription. mRNA is pretty reactive and can react with itself which is why we get alternative splicing. Protein are crazy reactive and are modified all the time based on their sequence & localization. When I was talking about reactive didn't mean it in the covalent-bond-forming kind of way.

Kind of funny that some of these viruses look all deformed and fucked up. Like a virus birth defect.

Almost like these viruses had.. Viruses

I don't understand why as biology literally doesn't effect their fields.

Because they are sexually repressed

Shit that sounds like one hell of a dandy genetic mutation, any downsides?

How so? I'm curious

The 6-factor equation allows us to do basic reactor physics

this is stupid why did you even post this?

Do we have the right to destroy viruses though? They're a form of life just as valuable as humans are.

>a form of life
t. Optimistic virologist

>Part of the human genome is comprised of virus RNA

What would be the virus equivalent of multicellular life? Is that what vampires are?

I haven't laughed this hard in a while, thank you.

There is strong evidence that the mammalian placetna is caused by a viral mutation. Basically humans could never exist without virus causing random evolutionary mutation

Source because that would be an awesome read

DNA actually
Article pls

Well if you lacked the specific marker the virus needs to infect a cell you're innately immune, if you lacked all markers though you would die.

first one of these i've seen that's specific to Veeky Forums

blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/02/14/mammals-made-by-viruses/
pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/evolution/endogenous-retroviruses/

>Early mammals used the spare viral parts left in the junk drawers of the genome to use a viral gene to help create the placenta, and other symbiotic viruses help turn us from a ball of cells into a fully-formed squalling infant and protect us from pathogens.
>Scientists are discovering that the so-called “junk DNA”—a significant portion of which is from symbiotic viruses—is actually a potent force in the evolution of new species. Although the evolution of pregnancy via the placenta might be some of the most persuasive evidence that viruses stashed deep within the genome can help give rise to new species, it’s not the only proof. New studies revealing the role of endogenous retroviruses in the more recent evolution of humans show that these snippets of DNA are helping to blur the boundary between human and virus. Humans are, in a very real sense, part virus.

>Viruses can cause generational cancer risk
I knew shit like HPV can cause cancer but holy shit

living/nonliving distinction is a spook

Veeky Forums pls go