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A virus, a capsule filled with genetic material that can’t replicate on its own, enters a cell and inserts its DNA. The cell reads that DNA and uses its own cellular machinery to produce viral progeny that emerge to invade another cell. The process repeats throughout the course of an infection. Or so we thought.
A new study published last week (March 12) in eLife suggests that in some cases, distinct segments of a single virus’s DNA or RNA can invade separate cells, making infection more of a “team sport.”
“It’s pretty rare that you see a paper come out like that, that’s so sort of conceptually groundbreaking that it really kind of changes in really fundamental way how you think about how viruses exist,” says Christopher Brooke, a virology researcher at the University of Illinois who was not involved in the ...
