How did viruses evolve? Are they a streamlined form of something that existed long ago, or an ultimate culmination of smaller genetic elements joined together? Aa Aa Aa The evolutionary history of ...

Curious bits of DNA tucked inside genomes across all kingdoms of life historically have been disregarded since they don’t seem to have a role to play in the competition for survival. Or so researchers ...

"Viruses understandably evoke a bad connotation because we know all the harm associated with viruses," Cadwell said. We have very good reason to surveil infections — H5N1 bird flu, for example — in ...

Viroids are tiny strands of circular, infectious RNA. They differ from viruses in that they do not have a protective protein coat and that they do not encode any proteins of their own. They are also ...

Some viruses, like the common cold, are a flash in the pan. They infect us, our bodies fight back — which is what makes us sick — and then they’re gone, until the next variant rolls along. Other ...

Viruses are notorious as scourges of cellular life, destroying as ruthlessly as any predator. Yet as microbiologists are now piecing together, these killers also sometimes perish as prey. “The dogma ...

At the beginning of the pandemic, many people hoped that infections with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 — or vaccines against the virus — would provide durable lifetime immunity, as is the ...

Certain pieces of DNA have been labeled as 'selfish genetic elements' due to notions that they don't contribute to a host organism's survival. Instead, researchers have now discovered that these ...