: Viruses are both villains and heroes #IndiaNEWS #Education Today Viruses have a bad reputation. They are responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic and a long list of maladies that have plagued humanity

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Viruses are both villains and heroes #IndiaNEWS #Education Today
Viruses have a bad reputation. They are responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic and a long list of maladies that have plagued humanity since time immemorial. But, is there anything to celebrate about them?
Power of bacterial viruses
Bacteriophages, or phages for short, keep bacterial populations in check, both on land and at sea. They kill up to 40% of the ocean bacteria every day, helping control bacterial blooms and redistribution of organic matter.
Bacteriophages are viruses that kill specific types of bacteria.
Their ability to selectively kill bacteria also has medical doctors excited. Natural and engineered phages have been successfully used to treat bacterial infections that do not respond to antibiotics. This process, known as phage therapy, could help fight antibiotic resistance.
Recent research points to another important function of phages: They may be nature’s ultimate genetic tinkerers, crafting novel genes that cells can retool to gain new functions.
Bacteriophages
Phages are the most abundant life form on the planet, with a nonillion – that’s a 1 with 31 zeroes after it – of them floating around the world at any moment. Like all viruses, phages also have high replication and mutation rates, meaning they form many variants with different characteristics each time they reproduce.
Most phages have a rigid shell called a capsid that is filled with their genetic material. In many cases, the shell has more space than the phage needs to store the DNA essential for its replication. This means that phages have room to carry extra genetic baggage: genes that are not actually necessary for the phage’s survival that it can modify at will.
How bacteria retooled a viral switch?
Phages come in two main flavours temperate and virulent.
Virulent phages, like many other viruses, operate on an invade-replicate-kill programme. They enter the cell, hijack its components, make copies of themselves and burst out.
Temperate phages, on the other hand, play the long game. They fuse their DNA with the cell’s and may lay dormant for years until something triggers their activation. Then they revert to virulent behaviour: replicate and burst out.
Many temperate phages use DNA damage as their trigger. If the cell’s DNA is being damaged, that means the DNA of the resident phage is likely to go next, so the phage wisely decides to jump ship. The genes that direct phages to replicate and burst out are turned off unless DNA damage is detected.
Bacteria have retooled the mechanisms controlling that life cycle to generate a complex genetic system.
Bacterial cells are also interested in knowing if their DNA is getting busted.

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