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STREAMLINED BEASTS. "Viruses are ancient and have played a major role in biological evolution. Such structurally simple creatures were not defined as living until recently. They take over a host's cellular machinery in order to replicate, and as such are true obligate parasites, unable to replicate without a host." https://lnkd.in/enwDruZ View in LinkedIn

ABUNDANCE. "It has been realized quite recently that viral particles are by far the most abundant biological entities on our planet. Indeed, they are ten times more abundant than bacterial cells in the upper ocean." https://lnkd.in/enwDruZ View in LinkedIn

ORIGINAL INHABITANTS. "There are 10 to the 33 viruses on our planet, about 10 times more than bacteria. There are only about 10 to the 9 human beings – a small minority, which makes us the invaders in the viral world, not vice versa. They are present in the oceans, 10 to the 12 per ml, in the soil, abundant in plants, and inside the human body. Healthy humans consist of about 10 to the 13 cells and harbor 10 to the 14 to 10 to the 18 bacteria and an unknown number of viruses." https://lnkd.in/eGaw2Kq View in LinkedIn

VAST NUMBERS. "Viruses are the most abundant ‘life forms’ in aquatic systems, and their number probably exceeds 10(29) in the ocean. Aligning these oceanic viruses and assuming an average diameter of 50 nm for a marine virus, the viral string-of-pearls would be 400,000 light years long. In comparison, the diameter of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is only 25,000 light years." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1462-2920.2003.00539.x/full View in LinkedIn

TEN TO ONE. "Microbial ecologists have demonstrated that viruses are the most numerous biological entities on earth, outnumbering cells by a factor of 10." http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1527/2263.full.pdf+html View in LinkedIn

MOST ABUNDANT CREATURE. "Viruses are found in almost every ecosystem on earth, and are the most abundant type of biological entity." https://lnkd.in/eF3wTsF View in LinkedIn

UBIQUITOUS VIRUSES "are numerically the most abundant biological entities, and they are profoundly important in shaping the ecology and evolution of just about every species on Earth. Yet viruses are not considered to be alive by most biologists, and they have arguably fallen by the wayside in the genomics revolution." http://www.genomebiology.com/2005/6/3/212 View in LinkedIn

CRITICAL ROLE. "I want to convince you of the importance of viruses other than as purveyors of disease, and that if it were not for viruses, life on the planet would probably not exist, or at least we would not exist." https://lnkd.in/e2MHV6z View in LinkedIn

"METAGENOMIC analyses have shown that environmental viral communities are incredibly diverse. There are an estimated 5000 viral genotypes in 200 liters of seawater and possibly a million different viral genotypes in one kilogram of marine sediment. By contrast, some culturing and molecular studies have found that viruses move between different biomes." https://lnkd.in/e9yYemH View in LinkedIn

SLOW AND FAST CHANGE. "Flu viruses have the capacity to change both slowly, through small genetic changes that are passed down to daughter generations, and quickly, through a process called “reassortment” that mixes larger genetic segments from several viral strains to create a new virus. Both processes are important to influenza’s success as a disease-causing organism during flu seasons and in pandemics." https://lnkd.in/eNYwEBt View in LinkedIn