Virus

[2810712]

that's a good idea to explain . They could really be doubtless-living thing for us in some times . But as Patrick says , huge gene-loss is harder to digest.

hrushikesh

[MrMistery]

Hey, the guy who discovered viruses got the nobel for chemistry, not bio... Doesn't really matter in our debate, but it is fun to know

[2810712]

are you looking at viruses as mixtures of chemical than a living organism ? ? ? But we can also be seen as a mix. of chem.s only the problem is we are too big and can move , think etc. on ourselves and all the chara. of living things.

hrushikesh

[MrMistery]

Of course we can be seen as a mixture of chemicals. But in our case, the whole is not simply the sum of it's parts. That could be the deff of life. We ar still trying to determine if that goes for viruses

[woopwoop]

How can viruses be regarded as a living organism? in all the classifications I have seen there's Living and Non-Living. In the non living category we have viruses, viroids, prions .. etc

A virus if left outside of a cell will not replicate, it will do absolutely nothing at all. Infact some times (especially with RNA viruses) will breakdown.
If it needs another organism to do anything at all I don't see how it can be deemed as living.

And seeing as a fair chunk of the human genome is viral (and surprising retroviral) I don't see why it's not plausible to say that viruses were here first. There's a lot of other points that come into play here but right now I'm too lazy and meant to be writing a report on protein vaccines!

[Poison]

Oh yes.. Thats why we call them 'non-living'...

[muntedkowhai]

the only hypothesis i can give for the possibility of the idea that viruses co-evolutioned with bacteriums is that they might have ONCE been capable of replicating outside of host cells but evolved to specialised to live intracelluarly and lost a majority of its genes it requires to replicate outside of the host.
many people forget that gene loss plays an important part of micro organism evolution
especially when they specialize in its niche.