There is no aspect of biology that has captured the public interest as much as viruses have. From the avian flu to HIV to SARS, viruses are in the news almost every day, so a site dedicated to ...

Lurking in the vast expanse of the ocean and buried deep in the Siberian permafrost, there are giants—not blue whales and ...

Biologists mapping the human microbiome expected to find new bacteria and viruses, not entities that slip through every ...

Only recently appreciated as critical components of cellular functions, unstructured stretches of amino acids called SLiMs are key to viral-host interactions. During an early COVID-19 lockdown in ...

There has long been debate about whether viruses are a form of life, because many of them are only made up of a bit of genetic material that’s enclosed in a package. That genetic material usually has ...

Viruses outnumber humans by about 400 trillion to one, and yet pandemics are rare. Why? Why do a few viruses inflict so much damage, when the vast majority are harmless or even helpful? Those ...

Biologists mapping the human body have long assumed that every major kind of microscopic life inside us already had a place ...

While largely unnoticed, phages do not harm humans. On the contrary, these viruses are gaining increasing popularity as biomedicines to eradicate pathogenic bacteria, especially those associated with ...

Viruses are entities that have to infect other cells in order to replicate. They may have genomes that are made of DNA or RNA. We are still discovering new types of RNA viruses, as shown in two new ...

Gain-of-function experiments can help researchers get ahead of viruses naturally gaining the ability to infect people in the wild. But they're also used for many other areas of study within biology.