Are viruses alive?
Viruses are basically selfish DNA. Like transposable elements, they use cellular machinery to perpetuate themselves. They cannot exist apart from cellular hosts. Indeed, this inconvenient fact posed a problem when viruses were first implicated in human disease, since they could not satisfy the part of Koch's postulates that required that the etiological agent be cultured in purified form.
So I read with interest the new genomics of bacteriophages and the discovery that some have huge genomes that carry functions previously not found in these viruses. Do these finding "blur the boundaries of life?" Absolutely not. They merely expand the boundaries of parasitic DNA properties. The title of this iflscience post is just clickbait, peeps.
https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/hundreds-of-new-viruses-with-enormous-genomes-blur-the-boundaries-of-life/?fbclid=IwAR3wajKaWwmpCSIBqgm-UyJQtDqrcmjnmfoTeqNTwVhLYqDZ6wTh3qLG3mk
So I read with interest the new genomics of bacteriophages and the discovery that some have huge genomes that carry functions previously not found in these viruses. Do these finding "blur the boundaries of life?" Absolutely not. They merely expand the boundaries of parasitic DNA properties. The title of this iflscience post is just clickbait, peeps.
https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/hundreds-of-new-viruses-with-enormous-genomes-blur-the-boundaries-of-life/?fbclid=IwAR3wajKaWwmpCSIBqgm-UyJQtDqrcmjnmfoTeqNTwVhLYqDZ6wTh3qLG3mk
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