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Bacteria and viruses are often lumped together as germs, and they share many characteristics. They’re invisible to the human eye. They’re everywhere. And both can make us sick, even kill us.
A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. [1] Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. [2] [3] Viruses are found in almost every ecosystem on Earth and are the most numerous type of biological entity.
See also Comparison of computer viruses. This is an alphabetical list of biological virus families and subfamilies; it includes those families and subfamilies listed by the ICTV 2023 report. [1] For a list of individual species, see List of virus species. For a list of virus genera, see List of virus genera.
Gamma phage, an example of virus particles (visualised by electron microscopy) Virology is the scientific study of biological viruses.It is a subfield of microbiology that focuses on their detection, structure, classification and evolution, their methods of infection and exploitation of host cells for reproduction, their interaction with host organism physiology and immunity, the diseases they ...
A virus with this "viral envelope" uses it—along with specific receptors—to enter a new host cell. Viruses vary in shape from the simple helical and icosahedral to more complex structures. Viruses range in size from 20 to 300 nanometres; it would take 33,000 to 500,000 of them, side by side, to stretch to 1 centimetre (0.4 in).
Some viruses can "hide" within a cell, which may mean that they evade the host cell defenses or immune system and may increase the long-term "success" of the virus. This hiding is deemed latency. During this time, the virus does not produce any progeny, it remains inactive until external stimuli—such as light or stress—prompts it to activate.
A Venn diagram is a widely used diagram style that shows the logical relation between sets, popularized by John Venn (1834–1923) in the 1880s. The diagrams are used to teach elementary set theory, and to illustrate simple set relationships in probability, logic, statistics, linguistics and computer science.
Bacteriophage MS2 (Emesvirus zinderi), commonly called MS2, is an icosahedral, positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus that infects the bacterium Escherichia coli and other members of the Enterobacteriaceae. [1] MS2 is a member of a family of closely related bacterial viruses that includes bacteriophage f2, bacteriophage Qβ, R17, and GA. [2]