Virus Gets a Taste of Its Own Medicine

jerry submitted, created time 3 months 1 week (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

Little more than protein capsules chock-full of genetic material, viruses barely rank among the living. Yet like people, at least one virus can catch a virus--the viral equivalent of coming down with the flu. This "flu" virus impairs the host virus's ability to grow and reproduce, a research team studying the largest known viruses reports.

Viruses are tiny biological hijackers that cause diseases that include the common cold, the flu, chickenpox, and AIDS. They infect animals, plants, and microorganisms and use their host's cellular machinery to make copies of themselves. Typically, viruses are particles so tiny that they can be easily seen only under an electron microscope. Then five years ago, bacteriologist Bernard La Scola and microbiologist Didier Raoult, both of the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France, and their colleagues identified in an amoeba a virus that was so big it was visible with a light microscope. The chromosome and size of that jumbo "Mimivirus" are on par with some bacteria, more than 10 times the size of the average viral chromosome (Science, 28 March 2003, p. 2033).

Keywords: mimivirus mimiviruses influenza the flu flu host virus viruses Virus