Viruses reprogram cells into different virocells
Tuesday, February 11, 2020 - 09:20
in Biology & Nature
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, so the adage goes, it must be a duck. But if the duck gets infected by a virus so that it no longer looks or quacks like one, is it still a duck? For a team led by researchers from The Ohio State University and the University of Michigan studying how virus infections cause significant metabolic changes in marine microbes, the answer is no. They refer to the infected microbial cells as virocells, a change in name first described in 2011 which reflects the metabolic changes they've undergone.