What are Some Properties of Viruses?
Viruses are extremely small. While bacteria typically have a size ranging between 0.5 – 5.0 micrometers, viruses are around ten times smaller, with a size range between 10 and 300 nanometers. Viruses cannot survive on their own, and depend upon hijacking the protein synthesis machinery of living cells to reproduce. Because of this, viruses are sometimes not considered true living things, but are rather called “organisms at the edge of life.” The domain name “Acytota” (meaning “without cells”) has been attributed to viruses, but it does not receive wide use. Most scientists do not regard viruses as living. Viruses are bits of genetic material, like a length of instruction tape, covered in a small protein shell called a capsid. Sometimes viruses have very basic “appendages,” such as filaments or tail fibers, such as in bacteriophages (bacteria-killing viruses), but oftentimes are just a small package. Their morphology may be helical, like a screw, icosahedral, like a geodesic dome, pleom
