Viruses (AQA A Level Biology): Revision Note

Key Features of Viruses

• Viruses are non-cellular infectious particles that straddle the boundary between ‘living’ and ‘non-living’

• They are relatively simple in structure; much smaller than prokaryotic cells (with diameters between 20 and 300 nm)

• Structurally they have:

  • A nucleic acid core (their genomes are either DNA or RNA, and can be single or double-stranded)

  • A protein coat called a ‘capsid’

• Some viruses have an outer layer called an envelope formed usually from the membrane-phospholipids of a cell they were made in

• All viruses are parasitic in that they can only reproduce by infecting living cells and using their protein-building machinery (ribosomes) to produce new viral particles

Viruses are not cellular like prokaryotes and eukaryotes – this is just one example of a virus structure