SKIRMISHER

Viruses are glorified scraps of genetic code that are exquisitely designed to pirate a host to reproduce: the common cold virus needs cells in the nose and respiratory tract to reproduce, before being spread with a sneeze.

But the discovery of a giant virus that itself falls ill through infection by another virus seems to suggest they too are alive, highlighting how there is no watertight definition of what exactly scientists mean when they refer to something as “living”.

“There’s no doubt, this is a living organism,” the journal Nature is told by Prof Jean-Michel Claverie, director of the Mediterranean Institute of Microbiology in Marseilles, part of France’s basic-research agency CNRS. “The fact that it can get sick makes it more alive.”

When the giant virus infects a host cell, an amoeba, they create a huge structure within the host, like a transient cell, that makes more viruses.

Thus, he said, the virus has the same role in its life cycle as a sperm does in the human life cycle. And it is not a surprise that this transient parasitic cell is itself vulnerable to viruses.

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{Photo: He may look like a virus, but he’s actually a pussy magnet!}

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