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( Virology)
Virology, often considered a part of microbiology or of pathology, is the study of biological viruses and virus-like agents their structure, classification and evolution, their ways to infect and exploit cells for virus reproduction, the diseases they cause, the techniques to isolate and culture them, and their potential uses in research and therapy. A major branch of virology is virus classification. Viruses can be classified according to the host cell they infect animal viruses, plant viruses, fungal viruses, and bacteriophages (viruses infecting bacteria, which include the most complex viruses). Another classification uses the geometrical shape of their capsid (often a helix or an icosahedron) or the virus's structure (e.g. presence or absence a lipid envelope). Viruses range in size from about 30 nm to about 450 nm, which means that most of them cannot be seen with light microscopes. The shape and structure of viruses can be studied with electron microscopy, with NMR spectroscopy, and most importantly with X-ray crystallography. The most useful and most widely used classification system distinguishes viruses according to the type of nucleic acid they use as genetic material and the viral replication method they employ to coax host cells into producing more viruses In addition virologists also study subviral particles, infectious entities even smaller than viruses viroids (naked circular RNA molecules infecting plants), satellites (nucleic acid molecules with or without a capsid that require a helper virus for infection and reproduction), and prions (proteins that can exist in a pathological conformation that induces other prion molecules to assume that same conformation).
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