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Entry, or penetration, is the second step in viral replication. This step is characterized by the virus passing through the plasma membrane of the host cell. The most common way a virus gains entry to the host cell is by receptor-mediated endocytosis, which comes at no energy cost to the virus, only the host cell. Receptor-mediated endocytosis ...
Viruses with no viral envelope enter the cell generally through endocytosis; they “trick” the host cell to ingest the virions through the cell membrane. Cells can take in resources from the environment outside of the cell, and these mechanisms may be exploited by viruses to enter a cell in the same manner as ordinary resources.
For the virus to reproduce and thereby establish infection, it must enter cells of the host organism and use those cells' materials. To enter the cells, proteins on the surface of the virus interact with proteins of the cell. Attachment, or adsorption, occurs between the viral particle and the host cell membrane.
Viruses do not have their own metabolism and require a host cell to make new products. They therefore cannot naturally reproduce outside a host cell [34] —although some bacteria such as rickettsia and chlamydia are considered living organisms despite the same limitation.
To infect a host cell, the virus must first inject its own nucleic acid into the cell through the plasma membrane and (if present) the cell wall. The virus does so by either attaching to a receptor on the cell's surface or by simple mechanical force. The binding is due to electrostatic interactions and is influenced by pH and the presence of ions.
Viruses may have once been small cells that parasitized larger cells. Over time, genes not required by their parasitism were lost. The bacteria rickettsia and chlamydia are living cells that, like viruses, can reproduce only inside host cells. They lend support to this hypothesis, as their dependence on parasitism is likely to have caused the ...
Viruses are non-living and do not have the means to reproduce on their own, instead depending on their host cell's machinery to do this. Thus, viruses do not code for most of the proteins required for their replication and the translation of their mRNA into viral proteins, but use proteins encoded by the host cell for this purpose.
Numerous RNA viruses are capable of genetic recombination when at least two viral genomes are present in the same host cell. [15] Very rarely viral RNA can recombine with host RNA. [ 16 ] RNA recombination appears to be a major driving force in determining genome architecture and the course of viral evolution among Picornaviridae ( (+)ssRNA ...