X-Nico

unusual facts about viruses



Alfred Hershey

He became director of the Carnegie Institution in 1962 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, shared with Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück for their discovery on the replication of viruses and their genetic structure.

Antimicrobial properties of copper

Adenovirus is a group of viruses that infect the tissue lining membranes of the respiratory and urinary tracts, eyes, and intestines.

Begomovirus

One group infecting a range of legumes originating from India and Southeast Asia (informally 'Legumovirus') and a set of viruses isolated from Ipomoea species originating from America, Asia and Europe (informally 'Sweepovirus') appear to be basal to all the other species.

Caulimoviridae

As replication requires the use of RNA intermediate, viruses from the Caulimoviridae family are not true dsDNA viruses - instead they are termed DNA reverse-transcribing viruses.

Common cold

Vaccination has proved difficult as there are so many viruses involved and they mutate rapidly.

Concept virus

Nimda (2001), named Concept Virus by its author, one of the first multi-vector Windows viruses.

David Prangishvili

David Prangishvili (born 1948) is a virologist at the Pasteur Institute of Paris, and a recognized expert on viruses infecting Archaea.

Docrates Cancer Center

Akseli Hemminki’s research team in Biomedicum of the University of Helsinki examines targeted viruses in cooperation with Docrates.

Drugs and devices in the Year Zero alternate reality game

This is a comprehensive list of drugs, viruses, and body augmentations from the Year Zero alternate reality game by Nine Inch Nails and 42 Entertainment.

Fall armyworm

Spodoptera frugiperda cells (Sf9 and Sf21 cell lines) are commonly used in biomedical research for the purpose of recombinant protein expression using insect-specific viruses called baculoviruses.

FGI-104

It works by inhibiting the protein TSG101 which is required by many viruses to replicate and reinfect other cells, and has been shown to protect mice from the Ebola virus.

HHV

Herpesviridae, a family of DNA viruses that cause diseases in humans and animals

Hygiene

Germs (potentially infectious bacteria, viruses etc.) are constantly shed from these sources via mucous membranes, faeces, vomit, skin scales, etc.

Inactivation

Inactivated vaccine, a vaccine that consists of viruses which are grown in culture and then killed

International Census of Marine Microbes

organisms including bacteria, Archaea, Protista, and associated viruses, exploring and discovering unknown microbial diversity, and placing that knowledge into ecological and evolutionary contexts.

International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses

The database classifies viruses based primarily on their chemical characteristics, genomic type, nucleic acid replication, diseases, vectors, and geographical distribution, among other characteristics.

Internet abuse

Malware, software designed to harm a user's computer, including computer viruses

IRAK4

Animals without IRAK-4 are more susceptible to viruses and bacteria but completely resistant to LPS challenge.

Kingsoft Internet Security

Kingsoft Internet Security, developed by Zhuhai based Chinese software developer Kingsoft, is an antivirus software which protects against viruses, Trojans, worms and other types of threats.

Lionel Crawford

He was awarded the Gabor Medal of the Royal Society in 2005 "in recognition for his work on the small DNA tumour viruses, specifically the papova virus group, papilloma, polyoma and SV40".

Murine leukemia virus

The murine leukemia viruses (MLVs or MuLVs) are retroviruses named for their ability to cause cancer in murine (mouse) hosts.

OpenPAT

However the basic OpenPAT process has the drawback of being unsuitable for instrumenting some special programs such as viruses, which can include self-modifying code, and the process requires external libraries to be explicitly instrumented if they are to be analyzed at a fine grained level (note however that OpenPAT does track external interactions at a course grained level without explicit library instrumentation).

Pathogen

Pathogenic viruses are diseases mainly those of the families of: Adenoviridae, Picornaviridae, Herpesviridae, Hepadnaviridae, Flaviviridae, Retroviridae, Orthomyxoviridae, Paramyxoviridae, Papovaviridae, Polyomavirus, Rhabdoviridae, Togaviridae.

Péter Szőr

From 2009 until his death, he worked for a McAfee antivirus firm working on a new solution to stop viruses.

Polytunnel

High tech poly houses even have heating systems as well as soil heating systems to purify the soil of unwanted viruses, bacteria etc.The recent Indo-Israel collaboration at Gharunda, near Karnal is an excellent example of Polyhouse farming taking place in a developing country.

Post viral cerebellar ataxia

A more complicated test that is performed for research analysis of the disease is to isolate viruses from the CSF (Cerebrospinal Fluid).

Pseudovirion

Pseudovirions are synthetic viruses used to inject genetic material, including DNA and RNA, with specific and desired traits into bacterial and eukaryotic cells.

Riboprobe

Some bacterial viruses code for their own RNA polymerases, which are highly specific for the viral promoters.

SCARB2

SCARB2 is a receptor for two viruses that cause hand, foot, and mouth disease in children, Enterovirus 71 and Coxsackievirus A16.

Sin Nombre virus

These include El Moro Canyon virus associated with the western harvest mouse, Reithrodontomys megalotis, Tula virus with Microtus arvalis and M. rossiaemeridionalis, Rio Segundo virus with the Mexican harvest mouse, R. mexicanus, Isla Vista virus with the California vole, M. californicus, and Prospect Hill-like viruses in Microtus species.

Smeg Virus Construction Kit

Messages within the two viruses Pile created with it, SMEG.Pathogen and SMEG.Queeg, suggest that it is also an allusion to the word smeg, used as a profanity by characters in the British TV series Red Dwarf.

Spam email delivery

Most of the major Windows e-mail viruses of 2003, including the Sobig and Mimail virus families, functioned as spammer viruses: viruses designed expressly to make infected computers available as spamming tools.

Spumavirus

The virions contain significant amounts of double-stranded full-length DNA, and assembly is rather unusual in these viruses.

Sven Jaschan

A report by Sophos in August 2004 claimed that Jaschan's viruses were responsible for 70% of the infections seen in the first half of that year.

Synthetic vaccine

Novartis Vaccine and Diagnostics, among other companies, developed a synthetic approach that very rapidly generates vaccine viruses from sequence data in order to be able to administer vaccinations early in the pandemic outbreak.

Transmission of hepadnaviruses

Hepadnaviruses are Group VII viruses that possess double-stranded DNA genomes and replicate using reverse transcriptase.

Virus hoax

This joke email claims to be authored by the Amish or other similar low-technology populations who have no computers, programming skills or electricity to create viruses and thus ask you to delete your own hard drive contents manually after forwarding the message to your friends.

Vitamin C and the common cold

The common cold is caused by several groups of viruses including rhinoviruses, coronaviruses and respiratory syncytial virus.

Yuan Chang

Yuan Chang (born November 17, 1959) is an American virologist and pathologist who co-discovered Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) and Merkel cell polyomavirus, two of the seven known human cancer viruses.


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