Jean-Michel Claverie pointed out that the viral factory corresponds to the real viral organism, whereas the virion corresponds
to the mechanism used by the virus to spread from one cell to others and that to confuse the virion with the virus would be the same as to confuse a sperm cell with a human being (Claverie 2006). One can wonder why the confusion between viruses and their virions became a paradigm in virology. This is probably because our modern conception of viruses was mostly elaborated following the work on “bacteriophages” performed in the fifties by the “phage group” in the USA and André Lwoff in France. Indeed, bacterioviruses did not produce viral factories and the viruses seemed to disappear (being reduced to their genomes) during the intraCombretastatin A4 cellular phase of their life cycle, known as the “eclipse phase”. Interestingly, Lwoff wrote forty years ago that the virus transforms JNJ-26481585 the entire infected cell into a viral factory (Lwoff 1967). If we consider now that the virus and the virion should not be confused, his sentence can be read: bacterioviruses (and archaeoviruses) transform MRT67307 the infected cell into a virion factory, i.e. into a virus! Many lytic viruses indeed trigger the degradation of the host genome. In that case, after destruction or inactivation of the cellular genome, when
the viral genome is the only one that is expressed, one can really consider that the infected “cell” is no more a bacterium, but a virus with a cellular appearance. ADP ribosylation factor A nice example of this conversion is provided by cyano-bacterioviruses (cyanophages) that encode their own photosynthetic proteins to replace the decaying cellular ones in order to get the proper energy required for the production of virions (Bragg and Chisholm
2008 and references therein). The former cyanobacterial cell thus becomes a photosynthetic virus. We observed recently the same type of conversion in the case of a virus infecting a hyperthermophilic archaeon (Bizet et al. 2009). This virus destroys the genome of its host and produces spectacular intracellular structures that break the cell envelope to prepare the release of its virions. If infected archaea and bacteria are indeed transformed into bona fide viruses, one can conclude that infected eukaryotic cells in which viral factories have taken control of the cellular machinery became viruses themselves, the viral factory being in that case the equivalent of the nucleus. By adopting this viewpoint, one should finally consider viruses as cellular organisms. They are of course a particular form of cellular organism, since they do not encode their own ribosomes and cell membranes, but borrow those from the cells in which they live. The question, “are viruses alive?” is typically a philosophical question, meaning that it is our choice to decide if viruses are living entities or not.