Ocean Viruses
Profile
Category
- Alien Contact
- Subcategory
- Viral Ecology
- Entries in Viral Ecology
- 5
- Words
- 186
PDA entry
- Viruses are strands of genetic material (DNA or RNA) that hijack living cells to copy themselves. They are not bacteria, which are fully independent living cells.
- 1. Obligate parasites
- Viruses cannot replicate without a host cell. Outside of cells, viruses form a protein shell called a virion.
- 2. Common, but specialized
- Viruses are the most abundant biological entity in the known universe, but alien viruses are rarely dangerous to humans. Viruses cannot cross between alien biologies. Viruses can only enter and hijack cells they have evolved alongside - like a key and a lock, or a software virus targeting a particular operating system.
- 3. Important to oceans
- Even after the Holocene Collapse, viruses remain essential to the function of Earths oceans. More than ten million viruses live in each droplet of seawater, infecting and killing more than twenty percent of all seaborne microorganisms each day. This cycle returns nutrients to the ocean for growth.
- 4. High viral load
- Sea viruses on this world are large and numerous. They are characterized by complex genomes and retroviral activity - the ability to insert their genes into a host's genome.
- Generating designation: PROTEAVIRUS.
Related entries
A mutated strain of the Proteavirus (Beta, or β) that influences infected organisms to help the virus spread.
Proteavirus (Proteavirus pluripotens).
The crab teratoma site provides insight into the behavior of the PROTEAVIRUS.
The titan rockbore (Lithodont titanicae) shares certain biological traits with the large organism on the...
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