In: Biology
A scientist is investigating a specimen in a laboratory. She is attempting to determine whether it is a virus or not. What qualities would allow her conclusively to determine whether or not the specimen is a virus.
The first property that will help the scientist to determine whether the given entity is virus or not is that if it will be a virus, it will behave as a non living thing when it is not present inside a living host cell but when it is present inside the host cell, it will behave as living organism. In this case, it will perform all the metabolic activities like replication of its genome and will undergo transcription and translation. It will capture the host machinery and integrate its genome into the host DNA.
The second quality is that when the virus will be the living cell, it can be crystallized like protein can be crystallized.
The third quality is that either DNA or RNA will be present if it is a virus. But if it is not a virus, then both DNA and RNA will be present.
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