Sunday, 1 February 2009

Virus-Host Interaction & Virus Life Cycle



Woosh!!!!! I’m back with a series of updates about the virus-host interaction and virus life cycle. After 4 lectures about the Virus-host interaction and the virus life cycle by Mr William HOW, I’ve receive considerable knowledge about the life cycle of viruses.

As molecular biology students, we know that Viruses are not a living organism defined by the Central Dogma but interestingly, they can still infect living organisms and cause diseases that vary from asymptomatic to death as a result of contracting such viruses. Viruses challenged the boundaries of life science as once doctors and scientists assumed that the only things that cause diseases were only bacteria, fungi and parasites. As Viruses are non-living entity, it would be interesting to look at how they infect the host and therefore cause the disease that they are known to cause.

With this, I’ve decided to share my knowledge as well as giving some of my opinions and comments about lectures on virus life cycle. I hope to get comments for my posts too.


Firstly, I’ve copied the stages of the Virus Life Cycle from the lecture for better understanding of the cycle itself. Below are the stages of the Virus Life Cycle. There are 5 stages all together.


Stages of Virus Life Cycle

I. Attachment and Entry

II. Replication and Expression
o Genome replication
o mRNA production, processing and translation

III. Assembly and Exit

IV. Viral Pathogenesis

Now that the stages of Virus life cycles have been labelled out, I hope that other students out there studying virology like me could get a better idea of the Virus-host interactions and the virus life cycle. This way of classifying the stages helped me in memorising and understanding the whole hoo-haa about Virus-life cycle.

In studying virus life cycle, there is this one thing that one must commit to mind.

  1. Attachment
  2. Penetration
  3. Uncoating
  4. Replication & Expression
  5. Assembly
  6. Release
Diagram showing a typical virus life cycle

No comments: