Viruses Are Your Friends! (Sometimes)
Sunday, January 9, 2011 - 17:40
in Health & Medicine
As luck would have it, I came down with a pretty bad case of the flu a couple days ago (courtesy of our little friends the Orthomyxoviridae). It wasn't exactly the way I wanted to spend my weekend, but even the flu has its compensations, and if nothing else it gave me a chance to read this nifty little article in Nature Reviews Microbiology about -- what else? viruses, of course. But not the kind of viruses we usually think about: viruses that harm their hosts. This review, to the contrary, is about viruses that benefit the organisms they infect. read more