A virus is a tiny, infectious particle that can reproduce only by infecting a host cell. Viruses "commandeer" the host cell and use its resources to make more viruses, basically …

But from the scale of a virus, you can see that the cell looks like a whole universe that it is emerging from. And this is an important picture because it really gives you a clue about how …

Heritable traits that help a virus reproduce (such as high infectivity for influenza, or drug resistance for HIV) will tend to get more and more common in the virus population over time.

Reproduction: Viruses cannot reproduce on their own; they require a host cell's ribosomes and other cell parts to replicate. Cells, on the other hand, have all the necessary components for …

Animal viruses, like other viruses, depend on host cells to complete their life cycle. In order to reproduce, a virus must infect a host cell and reprogram it to make more virus particles.

In the lytic cycle, viruses quickly take over the host cell, make many copies, break the cell, and infect other cells. In the lysogenic cycle, viruses sneak into the host's DNA, stay hidden, and wait.

A virus can live in two different phases – the lytic phase (where the virus actively replicates in a host cell) and the lysogenic phase (where the viral DNA incorporate itself into the cell’s DNA …

A virus can reproduce in a matter of minutes, given the same challenge of 20 generations a virus will have bone claws in about half an hour. We see the same thing in bacteria, the shorter the …

A defining characteristic of viruses is that they cannot reproduce on their own. Instead, they must infect host cells and “reprogram” them to become virus-producing factories.

Viruses do not have enough information to replicate their DNA or RNA. In order to replicate the information in the viruses' information code, the virus uses the information in the DNA of a host …