/sci/ - Science & Math

I have a theory that I was discussing with my genetics professor last semester. It gets a tad bit philosophical, so I could definitely be wrong, but it goes something like this:

If we assume that the ultimate goal an organism is to propagate its genetic code, viruses may be an alternative means of doing so for bacteria. In addition to mitotic division, bacteria may have, at one point, been able to genetically "rape" other forms of cellular life by creating viruses. The viral RNA would be the transcript of a portion of the mother bacterial DNA, and this RNA, once injected into the new host cell, would be translated and allow for the assembly of viral components inside the cell. These newly formed viruses would eventually lyse the cell and go on to propagate that fragment of RNA which could be traced back to a portion of bacterial DNA.

>So why would viruses use bacterial RNA instead of DNA?
Well that all comes down to practicality. A virus cannot perform any transcription or translation on its own, instead relying on the host cell to do its work for it. Host ribosomes do all of the translation of the viral RNA. Ribosomes do this translation outside of the nucleus, whereas transcription of DNA to RNA happens inside the nucleus. It would be pretty fucking hard for viral DNA to work its way into the nucleus to be transcribed, so the mother bacteria transcribes the viral genome itself. All the viral RNA has to do once inside the cell is wait; it will be translated eventually. Viruses, by themselves, are essentially neets, and they need hard working cells to do everything for them.

Let me know what you guys think. Pic unrelated.