Since novel coronavirus pneumonia in the teeth of the storm, this ancient creature has been pushed to the top of the storm again. As netizens joked: "people and viruses, there is always a must first crazy."
Since novel coronavirus pneumonia in the teeth of the storm, this ancient creature has been pushed to the top of the storm again. As netizens joked: "people and viruses, there is always a must first crazy.". It's true that the virus is harming our health and causing great inconvenience to our life. Now we novel coronavirus pneumonia may be very concerned about the epidemic. So, how much do you know about the "culprit" of the epidemic virus?
Virus is a noncellular form composed of a nucleic acid molecule and a protein, which can not show life phenomenon by itself. It's not hard to see from here that the virus has no cell structure at all and can't survive independently. It seems that it can't be called a typical "organism", but it does have some characteristics of parasite. It seems biased to call it "non organism" directly. So is the virus a living thing? This is a controversial issue at present. But now it is generally believed that the virus is neither living nor non living, but an organism between living and non living, called "quasi living".
What needs to be explained here is that there is also a kind of magic existence called "prion" in the world. Although it has the "honorary title" of virus, it actually has no nucleic acid, just a protein. Although it is also infectious, it can induce other proteins to have structural errors and become the same form as it, so that it "recruits" and "does whatever it wants" in the organism.
So how did viruses come into being? At present, there is no final conclusion on this issue. At present, there are about three mainstream views: one is "reverse theory", which can be understood as a kind of "degradation" of biological development; the virus may be caused by the loss of genes and structures of some independent living genes unrelated to "lying and winning" during a long period of "eating soft food" by some small cells living in a parasitic camp; the other is "theory of cell origin" On ": this theory holds that some viruses may have evolved from DNA or RNA escaped from large organisms. After all, viruses are relatively simple, so it is not unreasonable to" get rich "from a small part of cells. Finally, there is the theory of coevolution: the virus and the cell appear at the same time, and they parasitize in the cell at the beginning. They love each other and kill each other, and they have evolved until now. As far as the current technical means are concerned, we can not make a final decision on these claims, but the virus is likely to be generated in different periods through one or more mechanisms.
As for the brief discussion on the structure and propagation mode of virus, we must have been familiar with biology in senior high school, so here is just a brief summary. Viruses are made up of nucleic acids and protein shells, some of which contain polysaccharides and lipids. By injecting its nucleic acid into the host cell, the virus synthesizes and assembles its own components, and finally releases them out of the cell, forming many new viruses, and continues to "harm one side".
In fact, viruses are not "useless". In fact, viruses also have many benefits. They play a great role in natural biological genes. Now many biotechnology also focus on viruses, trying to achieve their goals by modifying them.
Of course, at this time, there may be a lot of witty little friends to ask: "isn't this a marine science program? You've been talking about the sea for a long time, and you're also involved in the sea?" Don't worry, the marine virus is coming soon!
But when it comes to marine viruses, compared with other fields, we humans actually know very little about them. However, although the mystery of marine viruses has not been completely solved, it does not mean that marine viruses are irrelevant to us. Many viruses living in the ocean will not only infect marine organisms, but also have a huge impact on marine ecology and aquaculture. At the same time, many viruses can be widely transmitted to humans. Novel coronavirus pneumonia is a more frightening thing. It is estimated that there are hundreds of millions of viruses in the ocean. And most of us do not understand how many of them can infect humans like new crown pneumonia. We don't know.
Marine viruses are widely involved in host selection, which can be described as "never picky". Their hosts are not limited to marine animals. Some of them are phages, bacteria, algae and cyanobacteria And so on, even if you want to, no marine virus can't be infected.
