• Question: How do virus get the energy they need to live?

    Asked by anon-256874 on 11 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Alex Holmes

      Alex Holmes answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      So viruses aren’t technically “alive” as such! In school we used “MRS GREN” to help remember all the necessary features of living organisms: Movement, Respiration, Sensitivity, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion and Nutrition. So viruses don’t have to make themselves move because they’re light enough to go through the air or in some cases water, they don’t need to respire (because they’re not doing all these other things), they don’t really sense things, they do grow and reproduce but they’re really sneaky and get other cells to do all of this for them! and then they don’t excete things or require nutrition. So because the only “living” thing they do they get other cells to do for them, you can see why they don’t need to have any energy themselves!!

      Although, when I did my masters degree I worked on a kind of bateria (which is alive) that couldn’t produce any of it’s own energy!!!

      The bacteria I worked on was called Chlamydia trachomatis and is responsible for the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia and also an eye infection called trachoma. Now, this bacteria was a bit different from other kinds because it lives inside human cells, and while it was in there it kind of figured out that the human cell was getting all these nutrients and making energy in the form of ATP, so why should the bacteria bother to do this too when it could just steal from the human cell? (sneaky right?) So the bacteria evolved and cut down on a bunch of genes that let it make certain sugars, iron, lipids and energy and instead it just developed new genes that would make transporters to just transport all the good nutrients and energy from the host into itself!

      You might be wondering why I was studying this? Well our idea was that if the bacteria can’t make it’s own energy, if we could stop these transporters working with a drug we’d essentially starve it and potentially develop a new medicine for these infections (we didn’t get that far, but it was a really cool idea)

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