Question

Give the general characters of viruses.

Answer 1

General characteristics of viruses are:

• They are ultramicroscopic disease causing organisms.
• They have no cellular organisation and metabolic machinery.
• They need host's machinery to make their replicas or copies.
  
• They have simple structure and basically composed of nucleic acid wrapped in protein coat.
• They are obligatory and intracellular parasites.
• They are completely inactive outside the host.
• They are always specific in their action i.e. infect a particular organism or organ.
• They are neither capable of growth nor division.
• They can be crystallised and even in crystalline form, their infectivity is retained.
• They can undergo mutations.