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by Welkin Johnson
It is possible that some viruses evolved from free living organisms, shedding their independent functions on the path to becoming "obligatory intracellular parasites." What minimal steps would be absolutely essential for this process to work in reverse, for a virus to slip the surly bonds of the cell and become an autonomously replicating unit?
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Wouldn't becoming free living make the virus into the cell? The virus would need translation machinery, transport, energy metabolism, amino acid synthesis/uptake, membrane synthesis, and division machinery. Couldn't the virus do this by being lysogenic?
Posted by: Ryan | February 09, 2009 at 06:40 AM