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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2009 : 17:36:38 [Permalink]
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Not really Big Papa.
Virus do not have metabolisms of their own and need a living organism's organism to pirate. Enzyme to make copies of their genetic material, translate it into proteins and so on...
Some viruses carry their own enzymes, for example retrotransposase, that copy RNA into DNA, these enzymes would not exist in their host.
So no a virus can not replicate into another metabolically inert virus... however a very recent and even cooler discovery has been the presence of a virophage's genome in the middle of another virus.
Virus really surfe the line between alive and not. But if we choose to include virus, I can see little reason not to include transposon and plasmids among the living. And then, what about prions? |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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Scientists develop RNA that replicates itself
