Virus Characteristic

Viruses are an infectious agent with very strange characteristic, they have both living and nonliving characteristic. Because viruses are the smallest creature about one per hundreds of bacteria size, viruses can infect animals, plants, and even other microorganisms. Viruses that infect to just bacteria called as bacteriophage, and those infect only to fungi called as mycophages.

The characteristic that show a living creature:

• Reproduce with a fantastic rate, but only in living host cells.
• Mutate easily

Characteristic that viruses like nonliving creature:

• Virus is acellular, that is, they contain no cytoplasm or cellular organelles.
• Virus carry out no metabolism on their own and must replicate using the host cell's metabolic machinery. In other words, viruses don't grow and divide. Instead, new viral components are synthesized and assembled within the infected host cell.
• Virus have vast majority of viruses possess either DNA or RNA but not both.

Criteria used to define a virus

• The vast majority of viruses contain only one type of nucleic acid: DNA or RNA, but not both.
• They are totally dependent on a host cell for replication. (They are strict intracellular parasites.)
• Viral components must assemble into complete viruses (virions) to go from one host cell to another.

Viruses just can live in certain cell, animal viruses usually can’t live in a human cell or plant cell. So viruses are very specific of certain animal or human being.

Orchid Virus Diseases

If you have a hobby of planting a flower like orchid, you should care this plant regularly because this plant have many problem mainly causes by some viruses. Orchid species can be affected by about 25 different of viruses. The most danger viruses for orchids are Odontoglossum Ringspot virus) ORSV and Cybidium Mosaic (CyMV). Once an orchid plant is infected by this virus, it cannot be cured. This viruses should be destroyed as soon as possible to avoid of virus spreeding to other ochids.

Decolonization on Flower due to CyMV

The characteristic of orchid that infected by viruses grow more slowly, may become stunted and take longer to produce flowers. Others may the flowers may be discoloured or deformed and smaller. Infected plant can also susceptible by other diseases that cause by bacteria and fungi. Virus disease can spread to other plants, but not to human and animals.

Oncidium Leaves with symptom of ORSV

Symptoms of plants that infected by viruses can vary and sometime without any visible symptoms. If the plant seen suspect symptoms infected by viruses as soon as separate the plant from others and have it to be tested. Infected plants should be destroyed at once. If you have infected orchid in your orchids collection, you should test all of your plants in order to eliminate spreading to all plants.

Orchid viruses can spread through hand, cutting tools, pots, etc. To sterilize this contamination from viruses you can dipped the tools or pots on 10% of bleach solution or dipped in alcohol or flamed.