New Virus Breaks The Rules Of Infection by Michaeleen Doucleff.
From the post:
Human viruses are like a fine chocolate truffle: It takes only one to get the full experience.
At least, that’s what scientists thought a few days ago. Now a new study published Thursday is making researchers rethink how some viruses could infect animals.
A team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases has found a mosquito virus that’s broken up into pieces. And the mosquito needs to catch several of the pieces to get an infection.
“It’s the most bizarre thing,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney, who wasn’t involved in the study. It’s like the virus is dismembered, he says.
“If you compare it to the human body, it’s like a person would have their legs, trunk and arms all in different places,” Holmes says. “Then all the pieces come together in some way to work as one single virus. I don’t think anything else in nature moves this way.”
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Also from the post:
These are insect cells infected with the Guaico Culex virus. The different colors denote cells infected with different pieces of the virus. Only the brown-colored cells are infectious, because they contain the complete virus. Michael Lindquist/Cell Press
The full scale image.
How very cool!
Any known analogies in computer viruses?