Restless Souls/Technology: Difference between revisions

The following subsections are meant to show what symbiosis is capable of and that it exist between very different species.

These sections display combinations of the so-called [[wikipedia:Kingdom_%28biology%29#Six_kingdoms|kingdoms]].

Unfortunately, viruses are unranked so far, in my layman understanding they form the fourth domain and seventh kingdom.

: The problem is that they are neither really dead nor alive. They are ''zombies'' so to say. They do nothing until they infect a suitable host cell and becomes active again. Living things were thought to have always an active metabolism. Then Tardigrades have been found out to break that rule with their cryptobiosis ("hidden life"). In that stage their metabolism is almost too low for measures [[wikipedia:Cryptobiosis#Examples|(under 0,01%)]]. After that discovery scientists had the rethink the definition of death. The microbes' state of temporary ''death'' became some kind of ''hibernation'', namely cryptobiosis, and some Christians were happy that their religion was the solo promise again for resurrection.

: A virus cannot reproduce itself without a host but that also true for some endoparasites (parasitic organism in other organism). And a virus has no own metabolism but can take over the host's metabolism and organelles. In this view a virus might be a very mean and cleaver parasite but it lives.

: So a virus makes the host its ''own'' body; '''the news are''' that there also exists '''symbiotic viruses''' and even viruses that doesn't take over a host cell but sorta vice versa, they became fully incorporated into the host's genome. Two examples: First, the [[wikipedia:Polydnavirus|polydnavirus]] inside of ichneumonid (parasitic) wasps is only produced when the wasps lay eggs into a caterpillar. The virus helps the wasp eggs to survive inside the caterpillar by affecting the immune system and changing the metabolism in advantages of the wasp eggs. The second example is about us humans (and all animals with a placenta). The retrovirus [[wikipedia:ERVWE1|ERVWE1]] in our genome can merge placenta cells by its produced protein "syncytin". In short, it is necessary to protect the embryo from the mother's immune system. It could be discovered as foreign body because of the father's genes. In other words the retrovirus gives us advantage compared to non-placental mammals.