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Except for viroids, can you think of any place where there are "naked," (capsidless) viruses outside of hosts?
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When you are talking about naked nucleic acids existing outside the cell, the term virus loses meaning. Certainly there must be transposons floating around in the environment, we just don't observe this because they can't have an effect exogenously. Perhaps if there were some super competent bacterial cell that could pick up sequences from its environment we would see this.
Posted by: Brandt Levitt | January 21, 2009 at 09:37 AM