Biology Lesson 40: The topic I chose for this essay is, “Describe some of the more complicated “things” that act like organisms but aren’t truly alive and how do these various entities function?”

Good afternoon, readers of this particular essay, here I am back with another biology essay. For this week’s topic, I’m going to be discussing the complicated ‘things’ that occur as organisms, yet aren’t alive. How is that so, you might ask. Well, these complicated ‘things’ are what we simply call viruses. You might now be thinking, okk we know what viruses are and what they do to us, but do many of you know how they function? If so that’s great! If not I’ll be happy to explain that for you in detail.

Now that we know that these complicated ‘things’ are called viruses, let’s dive into understanding how they function. To put it simply, there’s this system called the Lysogenic cycle. In this cycle the virus genome (genome is basically all the info needed to build an organism) injects itself into bacterial genome. This is now a virus genome, meaning this is now the virus that’s about to multiply. After the injection, the virus genome starts to duplicate silently so that these new versions of viruses can go and inject into other bacterial genomes.

Now, here’s the thing, viruses basically function as robots. They aren’t much help without the help of other viruses. In other words, viruses constantly need other viruses help to be able to function. Not only do they need help of other viruses, but they can’t revive themselves, meaning if their work is finished, so are they. We are still not sure, even today, if the viruses are considered real or not. All we know is that they work as machines until they die off.

I hope you liked this short essay on biology. I’ll be posting more essays soon and have a great rest of your day!