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VIRUSES HAVE BEEN SMEARED."New technologies have changed our understanding of viruses throughout the last ten years. Viruses are not primarily pathogens, which is a biased view based on the history of medicine. Most viruses do not cause diseases. Viruses cause diseases if a well-established equilibrium, which evolved over billions of years, gets out of balance." https://lnkd.in/eGaw2Kq View in LinkedIn

OBLIGATE PARASITES. "It has been well known for decades that the evolution of numerous parasitic and symbiotic organisms entails simplification rather than complexification. In particular, bacteria that evolve from free-living forms to obligate intracellular parasites can lose up to 95% of their gene repertoires without compromising the ancestral set of highly conserved genes involved in core cellular function." https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn

MICROBIOME INITIATIVE. View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues on the second weekend of reductive evolution. Examples of genetic streamlining are numerous. Reductive evolution is considered to be the dominant force in evolution, interspersed by periods of explosive complexification, when new species emerge. It runs against the long-held assumption that increasing genetic complexity is the inevitable and singular driver in living things. View in LinkedIn

UNDER ONE PERCENT. There are millions of types of viruses but only about 5,000 have been described in detail. This is less than a small fraction of 1% of the total. We are living in the viral dark ages in terms of our knowledge. https://lnkd.in/eihaD8M View in LinkedIn

WM STANLEY. "Needless to say, for a time there was great skepticism that the crystalline material could be tobacco mosaic, due chiefly to the old idea that viruses were living organisms. A wide variety of experimental approaches has been used to test the proposal that the crystalline ma-" "terial represented tobacco mosaic virus. It was found that essentially all of the virus activity present in infectious juice could be isolated in the form of the crystalline material. The virus activity of this material was about 500 times that of the starting material." (Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1946). https://lnkd.in/eRJ7Biu View in LinkedIn

VIRAL PERCEPTIONS. "For about 100 years, the scientific community has repeatedly changed its collective mind over what viruses are. First seen as poisons, then as life-forms, then biological chemicals, and today many scientists think of viruses as existing at the border between chemistry and life: a gray area between living and nonliving." https://lnkd.in/e7AX8A4 View in LinkedIn

CRYSTALLIZATION OF VIRUSES. "Recall that many serious biologists and chemists in those earlier years still adhered to the belief that some “vital” force outside the known laws of chemistry and physics would be needed to explain the phenomenon of life." The 1946 Nobel Prize was awarded to Wendel Stanley for crystallizing tobacco mosaic virus. https://lnkd.in/eqSfd3G View in LinkedIn

34,000-YO VIRUS RESURRECTED from permafrost. Frozen without special reagents and slow cooling. https://lnkd.in/ekHnSGM View in LinkedIn

CRYSTALLIZATION AND RECONSTITUTION of a seemingly living entity is absolutely confounding to most scientists. This is the domain of the chemistry lab, retorts and Bunsen burners, not the domain of wriggling, wet, and ingenious biology. Cryopreservation of animal cells is one thing, using special reagents to avoid ice crystal formation. Crystallization is quite another. View in LinkedIn