![]() ![]() There are exceptions to nearly every rule, but viruses do have things in common, said Carette.Ī virus’s travel kit always includes its genome - its collection of genes, that is - and a surrounding protein shell, or capsid, which keeps the viral genome safe, helps the virus latch onto cells and climb inside, and, on occasion, abets a getaway by its offspring. Viruses travel light, packing only the baggage they absolutely need to hack into a cell, commandeer its molecular machinery, multiply and make an escape. Or, you could say more charitably, it’s very efficient. On its own, it can’t reproduce itself or, for that matter, produce anything at all. “Outside of a cell, a viral particle is inert,” virologist Jan Carette, PhD, associate professor of microbiology and immunology, told me. That - 10 to the 31st power - is the mind-numbing estimate of how many individual viral particles populate the planet. Try multiplying a billion by a billion, then multiplying that by 10 trillion. Viruses are easily the most abundant life form on Earth, if you accept the proposition that they’re alive. And then there’s this thing called “side effects.” You don’t see those in a dish. ![]() Plus, the environment surrounding, say, a lung cell in a person’s body is different from the one in a culture dish. The cells in that dish aren’t the same as the cells in living tissues affected by SARS-CoV-2. Compared with a lab dish, living people are complicated. As researchers learn more and more about the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, this knowledge - gathered through unmatched levels of scientific cooperation - is being turned against the virus in real time. Here’s a primer on viruses in general and SARS-CoV-2 in particular. Today, as COVID-19 spreads around the globe, the greatest army of medical scientists ever assembled is bent on learning all it can, as fast as it can, about SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic. ![]() “Know your enemy,” Sun Tzu, the great sage of war, wrote some 2,500 years ago. ![]()
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