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Article Dans Une Revue Nature Reviews Microbiology Année : 2008

Redefining viruses: lessons from Mimivirus.

Résumé

Viruses are the most abundant living entities and probably had a major role in the evolution of life, but are still defined using negative criteria. Here, we propose to divide biological entities into two groups of organisms: ribosome-encoding organisms, which include eukaryotic, archaeal and bacterial organisms, and capsid-encoding organisms, which include viruses. Other replicons (for example, plasmids and viroids) can be termed 'orphan replicons'. Based on this suggested classification system, we propose a new definition for a virus--a capsid-encoding organism that is composed of proteins and nucleic acids, self-assembles in a nucleocapsid and uses a ribosome-encoding organism for the completion of its life cycle.
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hal-00297223 , version 1 (15-07-2008)

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Didier Raoult, Patrick Forterre. Redefining viruses: lessons from Mimivirus.. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 2008, 6 (4), pp.315-9. ⟨10.1038/nrmicro1858⟩. ⟨hal-00297223⟩
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