巨型病毒比我们想象的更有生命迹象

Biology Giant viruses more alive than we think Discovery raises questions about the boundary between living and non-living organisms Alessio Cozzolino VIRUSES rely on the machinery of their host cells to produce proteins, but some giant viruses encode a key part of this toolkit in their genome, enabling them to direct the host cell to produce more of their own proteins. The finding could reignite the debate over whether viruses, which require hosts to carry out all their vital processes, are actually living organisms. Giant viruses have drawn growing attention from biologists since 2003, when a mystery microbe found in Bradford, UK, was identified as a “mimivirus”, which infects amoebae. …