A giant virus discovered in Japan is adding fuel to the provocative idea that viruses helped create complex life. Named ushikuvirus, it infects amoebae and shows unique traits that connect different ...

Microbiologists Patrick Moreira and Purificación López-García, together with virologists Arturo Ludmir and Lynn Enquist, are at the center of a sharp debate over whether viruses count as living ...

Scientists are uncovering viral features that blur the boundary between living and non-living, from giant viruses with protein-making tools to mysterious RNA entities in our microbiomes. These ...

The COVID-19 pandemic led to heightened public interest in learning about viruses and how they can cause diseases. There has been a lot of focus on communicating virology concepts to the general ...

Genetics tools have advanced significantly in recent decades, and have allowed scientist to sequence all of the genetic material they find in any sample. That has enabled researchers to discover giant ...

Benjamin tenOever harnesses microRNA circuits and viruses to advance xenotransplantation and develop treatments for rare ...

Researchers describe the full molecular structure of the phage DEV. DEV infects and lyses Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria, an opportunistic pathogen in cystic fibrosis and other diseases. DEV is part ...

A few months into his postdoctoral research at Baylor College of Medicine in 2021, Rafael Michita made a curious observation. Peering at Zika viruses infiltrating placenta cells under a microscope, he ...

Herpes simplex viruses (HSV) are ubiquitous, double‐stranded DNA viruses that establish lifelong infections in human hosts. Central to their cycle is the process of membrane fusion, which permits ...

Animal viruses have significantly contributed to understanding cell biology and developing preventive strategies against infectious diseases. Nonetheless, research on human viruses has taken ...

If we want to prevent viral infections or develop drugs that can effectively treat them, those infections have to be investigated and understood. As such, scientists have long been researching viruses ...

While largely unnoticed, phages do not harm humans. On the contrary, these viruses are gaining increasing popularity as biomedicines to eradicate pathogenic bacteria, especially those associated with ...