• Question: How can a virus be made?

    Asked by Charlie to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 18 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Clare Harding

      Clare Harding answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      I have made a virus before! It can be as easy as putting 8 circular pieces of DNA into the same cells and then a virus appears and starts spreading between your cells. It was amazing the first time I got it to work.

      Some viruses are a lot more complicated than this though and for some, this system doesn’t work for reasons that you should probably ask Arthur!

    • Photo: Arthur Dyer

      Arthur Dyer answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Yup as Clare said a virus is basically a bit of genetic material (DNA in some viruses) wrapped in a shell of some kind.

      If you wanted to create your own virus you’d have to work out how you get that DNA to replicate better than the host cell’s DNA and fast/slow it would kill a cell to get out (or if it would kill the cells at all!) and how it would hide from your immune cells etc… you could create something really nasty if you wanted to 😛

      But evolution has done a way better job than we could ever do and these viruses have evolved over 1000s of years to be really nasty by themselves

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