Today it is well known that viruses may contain DNA (poxvirus, mimivirus) or RNA (influenza virus, Zika virus), but for many years it was thought that genomes were only made of DNA. The surprise at finding only RNA in a virus is plainly evident in a 1953 letter from Harriett Ephrussi-Taylor to James D. Watson ...

On episode #381 of the science show This Week in Virology, Carl Zimmer joins the TWiV team to talk about his career in science writing, the real meaning of copy-paste, science publishing, the value of Twitter, preprint servers, his thoughts on science outreach, and much more. You can find TWiV #381 ...

If you want to understand life on Earth, you need to know about viruses. We have reached the halfway point in my 2016 Columbia University undergraduate virology course. So far we have learned the basics of virus replication: how viruses enter cells, how the genome is reproduced, and how proteins are ...

I was asked to write a commentary for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to accompany an article entitled SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence. I'd like to explain why I wrote it and why I spent the last five paragraphs railing against regulating gain-of-function experiments. Towards the end of ...

On episode #380 of the science show This Week in Virology, the TWiVeroos deliver the weekly Zika Report, then talk about a cryoEM structure of a plant virus that reveals how the RNA genome is packaged in the capsid, and MIMIVIRE, a CRISPR-like defense system in giant eukaryotic viruses. You ...