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COOPERATIVE STRATEGY. "Viruses can co-operate, that is they interact to build groups that invade host genomes and even compete as a group for limited resources such as host genomes. This leads to an extraordinary effective result and a key behavioral motif that is able to integrate a persistent lifestyle into cellular host organisms, the ‘‘addiction’’ modules: former competing viral groups are counterbalancing each other together with the host immune system." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

INCOMPARABLY MORE EXTENSIVE. "All these lines of evidence and reasoning suggest that the principal classes of prokaryotic viruses, including positive-strand RNA viruses, retroid elements, and several groups of DNA viruses, emerged within the primordial genetic pool where mixing and matching of diverse genetic elements was incomparably more extensive than it is in any modern biological community." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

NO COMMON ROOT. "Comparative genomics provides no evidence of a monophyletic origin of all viruses. Many virus groups simply share no common genes, effectively, ruling out any conventional notion of common origin. When applied to viruses, the notion of "common genes" is not a simple one because commonality is not necessarily limited to clear-cut orthologous relationships between genes that translate into highly significant sequence similarity." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

FEW NEEDED. "Importantly, a key feature of this viral lifestyle is that only few need to remain as functional agents, such as mammalian endogenous retroviruses needed for in the syncytia, which regulates mammalian pregnancy. Here, a much larger number of retroviral-derived code (LTRs) are providing the regulatory network of the placenta." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

VIRAL NICHES. "The extraordinary diversity of double-stranded (ds) DNA bacteriophages is in a stark contrast to the absence of bona fide dsDNA viruses in plants. Conversely, RNA viruses are extremely abundant and diverse in plants and animals but are currently represented by only two compact families in bacteria, and so far have not been detected in archaea." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

DARK MATTER. "The visible living world of organisms of all domains is literarily the tip of the iceberg surrounded by biology’s viral ‘‘dark matter’’ of which we are currently scratching the surface at best." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

VIRAL DIVERSITY. "A remarkable feature of viruses is the diversity of their genetic cycles, in a sharp contrast to the uniformity of the cellular genetic cycle. Viruses with different genome strategies span a vast range of genome sizes (the genomes of the largest known virus, the mimivirus, and the smallest viruses, e.g., circoviruses, differ by three orders of magnitude) and show a non-uniform and non-trivial distribution among the host taxa." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

VAST NUMBERS. "If we ignore eukaryotes and only consider prokaryotic life, we have a number of prokaryote viruses of 10(31), which means if we line up the length of their virions, we get 40 million light years." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

DOMINANT LIFESTYLE. "We have heard much about non-coding RNAs, mobile genetic elements, repeat sequences, and introns— all of them formerly being termed ‘‘junk,’’ but now we can imagine these as remnants of persistent viral infection events. Thus, the persistent viral lifestyle is the most dominant biological lifestyle on this planet." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

"VIRUSES and virus-derived parts represent the most abundant genetic information on the planet overrepresenting cellular genetic information ten times." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn