生物学英语教程10 18 19 20 23 24原文及翻译.docxVIP

10: The nature of viruses has been apparent only within the last half century, and the first step on this path of discovery was taken by the Russian botanist Dmitri Lvanovsky in 1892 when he studying the tobacco mosaic disease.Viruses are very small entities,ranging in size from 0.02 to 0.3 microns. Unlike the organisms making up the five taxonomic kingdoms of the living world, viruses are acellular, they don’t consist of cells and conduct energy metabolism-they don’t produce ATP and incapable of fermentation , cellular respiration or photosynthesis. As for these, the questions of the viruses origin arise. Do they represent a primitive ‘nearly living’ stage in the evolution of life? Or are they organisms which have lost all cellular components except the nucleus? Could viruses simply be fragments of genetic material derived from cellular organisms? No one really knows the answers to these questions, but we do know that viruses have been around for a long time, and that almost every form of life is susceptible to viral attack.The basic units of a virus consist of nucleic acid surrounded by a capsid or coat, composed of one or at most a few kinds of proteins. These proteins are so assembled as to give the virion a characteristic shape. As they bud through host cell membranes, many animal viruses also acquire a membrane consisting of lipids and proteins, and many bacterial viruses have specialized ‘tails’ made of protein. The viral nucleic acid is usually a single molecule and may be composed of either DNA or RNA, but not both. DNA or RNA can be double-stranded or single-stranded.Viruses are obligate intracellular parasite, that is why they must depend upon specific hosts for their reproduction and development. The cells of animals, plants and bacteria can all serve as hosts to viruses. Animal viruses attach to special sites on the plasma membrane of the host cell and are then taken up by endocytosis. A given virus can infect only those cells that have a receptor site