T4 bacteriaphage

[surveyor]

This is sort of a test to see how to attach a picture file to a post, but if this works, this picture is an electron scan of a virus that infects an e. coli bacteria. It begins to replicate DNA and inject into the host within 10 minutes and at such speed that after only a few minutes the host bacteria bursts open with 150-200 brand new virus. The energy required to do this would be roughly equivalent to a car engine, if the virus was enlarged to car size. and we thought ebola was scary.

 

[FireFighterZero]

The Red Army used to use phages as an anti bacterial.

 

[gf beranek]

That image is wild! Amazing! Thank you for sharing.

 

[PCTREE]

I never realized that viruses had a form like that. I guess in my feeble mind they were just a large molecule with rna

 

[gf beranek]

The legs attach and then fold so the body can inject its goodies. They say virus are not living things, but they sure act like one.

 

[MasterBlaster]

Microbiology was the hardest/bestest class I took in college. I'd love to be a microbiologist!

 

[surveyor]

It's amazing what you can discover on the internet. They say this phage has a code of life that is 169,000 base pairs long (I wonder how that compares with the computer code for the average website), with instructions for making 289 proteins, any one of which if missing, would be detrimental to the life cycle. In addition the phage needs to detect if the bacteria is the right kind of host in order to replicate itself. It seems that the hypo-tail that injects the DNA, with the machine to unzip and copy, is not yet deployed in the picture above.

 

[CurSedVoyce]

Everyone worries about what if a comet hits or solar flare or chemical things...
It's going to be one of those little bugs that will do us in I tell yeah .....
Or a combination there of..

 

[PCTREE]

so you are saying a meteorite will strike us with a virus that will be activated by a solar storm??

 

[gf beranek]

This guy, Craig Venter, has created, from scratch and digital code, life. Scary. Viruses mostly, I think. Check it out.

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QHIocNOHd7A?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[surveyor]

He has copied the code from an existing organism, then had another organism (yeast) make copies of his copy, and finally substituted this copied code into yet another pre-existing cytoplasm, which already has the machines required for cellular tasks like carrying sugars, copying DNA, removing wastes, converting energy, regulating production speeds, communicating with the environment, etc. I hope they can use this for some useful purpose for man, and not have an oops moment with their "water marks".

 

[gf beranek]

Leave it to the government, and big Pharma, to decide the direction this technology goes. Scary! Oops!!

 

[flushcut]

That looks almost like the AIDS virus.

 

[CurSedVoyce]

so you are saying a meteorite will strike us with a virus that will be activated by a solar storm??

Yeah, we're pretty much frigged unless we evolve in to a cockroach