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Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Interesting Student Questions

One of my Honors Biology students asked me an interesting question that I cannot think of an answer for off the top of my head and thought there might be someone on here with more knowledge of viruses than myself. We were discussing the lytic and lysogenic cycles of a virus and she wrote me after to school with this question:

"If, theoretically, there was a virus that attached to sperm cells and then entered the lysogenic cycle, would it be possible for the virus to remain in the cell's DNA even when it combined with an egg at conception? And if so, could it then remain in the cell as it divided and then be part of every cell in the fetus' body? And then [theoretically/hypothetically] could every cell's viral DNA be triggered simultaneously somehow, and then every cell in the body would become a virus factory and then they would all BURST! ALL AT ONCE! And if such a thing could happen, what would happen when all the cells ruptured? Like, what would the symptoms be, like instantaneous death or something?"

Pretty interesting question, what are your thoughts?
R.D.

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** The odds of that actually happening are not worth contemplating. Inborn errors in metabolism take place regularly due to viruses, but I would suspect that any lysogenic viral DNA incorporated in the host cell's DNA at that point would be silenced by epigenetic mechanisms or by imprinting upon fertilization and during development. So it would probably be looked over indefinitely. And if it doesn't get looked over, the developing fetus may not make it to term...

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