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ok, so how exactly do you carry out the "purification" and "isolation" ?

something like take a supernatant from lysed cell culture (where virus has been infecting cells), and centrifuge the big stuff (or physically fractionate to get things if the size you are interested in)

what you get will be mainly protein particles with some sort of nucleic acid. you can then characterise both of those with a million techniques including sequencing, structure etc

the results you get are consistent with what a virus is supposed to be. what that actually means is a different question

bear in mind that most of human DNA is probably viral in origin by this definition. the whole thing is deep af and nobody really understands it. but pretending there's nothing there is kinda stupid

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pseudo~u *likes nostr already* 11mo ago

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to elaborate a bit, the "deeper stuff" is that really the lines we draw between organisms are really completely abstract, a human construct to help us simplify reality in a way we can get our heads around

when you actually consider objectively what "we" are, it includes more bacteria and bacterial genes than "human" ones - notably in the gut where they're part of our digestive system but also at a deeper level within our cells - as mitochondria seems clearly to be ancient bacteria that built a bunch of stuff around them.

from this perspective you can argue we are really just structures bacteria have built around themselves. plants too as chloroplasts are the same.

but not only that, the lines between individual bacteria are very blurred. I think where you get to is the whole thing is one big network of genes without any deep distinction between one part and another.

viruses come in as shuttles for genes - packets on the network if you like

all of which leads to the even deeper question of what "I" am and how I connect to this network. but I'll leave that for now!