Biology 1001A Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Intracellular Parasite, Mutation Rate, Retrovirus
22 Oct 2016
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They don"t belong on the tree of life because they are not living. They are obligate parasites, obligate intracellular parasites. They don"t grow and develop the way other cellular device those. Living components fact that they can evolve. There is no clear place on the tree of life of where viruses come from. One idea: the ancestor of viruses were some cellular organism (some sort of bacteria that went through reductive, loss of independent metabolism) Viruses are actually just really ancient, evolved way before the tree of life was established before the origins of cellular life. Maybe viruses don"t just have a single origin, they might have multiple origins. Viruses spend almost an entire life cycle inside the cell of the host, barely have its own physiology. Doesn"t have its own metabolism, cell wall we cant kill the virus without killing the host cell. The cure is worse than the disease.
