5 unbelievable but true facts about viruses
We have all been hearing about the coronavirus, and many of us have had a regrettably close brush with it. Popular science fiction pictures the virus as a vicious monster with large teeth and frightening superpowers to harm heroes. Most people think the coronavirus is a kind of harmful microscopic creature, as the green blob we see in posters suggest. But what if it’s none of the above? Here’s a collection of virus facts you probably do not know.
Viruses are not even living things
Viruses are in the twilight zone between life and non-life. Unlike other micro-organisms that are clearly alive, viruses don’t need food, and they have no metabolism. They have four or five genes, unlike bacteria, which have about a thousand genes. We are made up of thousands of genetic sets coded in a complicated way to run our system. This means it’s really hard to exterminate viruses. How do you kill what is not alive?
They are frightfully simple
Some scientists argue that viruses are perhaps the simplest living organisms on the planet, given that they are not really alive. They have no brains, no digestive system, no stimuli, and they can’t reproduce. Yet they are able to wreak incredible havoc inside our bodies simply because their simplicity makes them terrifyingly targeted, i.e. they are focused on only one function, to mutate and grow.
They operate by hijacking the systems of living hosts
Viruses are brainlessly parasitic. This means that once they enter a living cell, they begin to take over its biochemical machinery, so they literally hijack the host system. Their behaviour is like a computer virus, aimed at ‘hanging’ and ‘crashing’ our machine. To fuel its unstoppable growth, the virus steal energy and building blocks of the host, and the host’s protein becomes recruited by the virus
Viruses can be created from very few lab components
Viruses are so simple that it is possible to easily assemble one in a lab from protei- based components. The recipe would sound like this: Take purified protein and purified nucleic genome. Mix them in water in the lab to achieve the right conditions of salt, acidity, and temperature. Leave them alone, and these humble components will spontaneously sprout into infectious virus particles.
They can be really pretty to look at
Viruses grow in beautiful patterns and are more symmetrical than any object in nature. They have close knit hexagonal blocks fitting into a sphere like a football. Their tight symmetry makes it difficult for us to break them up.