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Are viruses alive? This question has stumped scientists for years now
as some agree they are alive, and others believe they are not. Both
sides have valid points, but with a new scientific paper that just came
out, the authors are hoping to convince the scientific community that
they are. There are 9 main functions of cells that help consider them
alive. I chose 3 questions I thought were important in determining if a
something is alive or not, they are as followed. Can they reproduce
without a host cell? Can they evolve by exchanging their DNA with
other viruses or organisms? And finally, can they use their genetic
make-up to function?
Re-using a protein folds means that it is common or shared
between types of viruses or cells. Using Figure 1 C-D, We see the most
use in protein folds in ssDNA. This is because on the graph you can see
it doesn't have a square except for the line at the bottom. This means
that there are very few unique folds and that the folds are mostly used
in in multiple places. This supports the escaped gene hypothesis
because they are selfish genetic elements that are retaining their own
protein folds instead of using the cells proteins, which would have
different folds from cell to cell or using different virions to infect other
cells.
Figures 3-4 and Table 4 can help us get a sense of anything
interesting about a type of virus and what its genome carries. Viruses
can infect archaea, bacteria, and eukarya. In these viruses, RNA viral
subgroups were found only in eukaryotes and a lot of DNA viruses
infected prokaryote hosts. This means that different kinds of viruses
containing different genetic material are able to access different
things. The FSFs that were present in Figure 3C were existent early on
in evolution and were detected in all 3 groups. This could suggest that
viruses originated in the early stages of cell development. These
viruses all have dsDNA in them which is important to early life because
dsDNA is the genetic material in a lot of modern cells, suggesting that
viruses might have helped introduce dsDNA into early cells or these
cells were better able to replicate their genome as compared to RNA.
The title of this article makes it seem as if they are trying to
prove that viruses are alive, however the research did not really
address any of my questions. It gave me information on how they can
use their genetic makeup or that they can reproduce without a host
cell. This article seemed to be a starting point for this information, but
not a means to prove that viruses are real. So I would say that the data
alone did not prove to me that viruses are alive, more so that they are
related or have learn to coevolve with them, developing similar protein
folds.
In the discussion, the authors talk about the three different
hypotheses, one being the reductionist hypothesis. The reductionist
Works Cited
Caetano-Anolles, Gustave & Nasir, Arshan. (2015, Sept 25). A
phylogenetic datadriven exploration of viral origins and evolution. Science
Advances, 1, n.p. doi:
10.1126/sciadv.1500527.