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.