A New Theory of Viruses

Original post: here.

This post presents an alternative view of viruses that seems to encompass known viral phenomenon and consequences as well as unseen phenomenon that could be searched for/tested in vivo or in vitro.

Let us begin by expanding a Virus Organism beyond a single virion, and call it a distributed organism composed of the set of all infected cells.

Def. 0 - Viral Organism - a distributed organism composed of all "signaled"/"infected"-cells via a networking protocol that utilizes small biological vesicles, called virions, as messengers.

Programmatically, a virion is only a particular state of one "thread" of the total highly-concurrent and distributed program that is the total Viral Organism.

Infection Outcomes

If we see a Virus as a distributed organism then the following practical infection principles are true:

1. The optimal infection for a virion would be: hijack a cell in a way that does not kill the cell but causes the infected version of the cell to replicate. This infection result could lead to things such as a tumor inside a multicellular organism.
2. The next best outcome is to hijack a cell that continuously produces and outputs virions without dying (from the virion production and launching process), but for which the cell will not be capable of self-replicating an infected version of itself.
3. The most common outcome is that the infected cell does not continue to self-replicate or even properly function after it has reached the infected state. It merely produces a finite number of virions and slowly explodes (theoretically, at least).

The fact that number 3 is the most common outcome suggests that virions are merely lucky for cell infections and further virion production.

For example, do viral infections exist in nature where new virions are not further produced after the viral DNA/RNA are inside the cell? If this phenomenon occurs then it would suggest that virions can often get "interface-lucky" with a foreign cell type from their own organism.

Chimeric Replication as Optimal Gene Therapy

Going further with the distributed organism theory, we can draw some conclusions towards gene therapies.

For example, considering infection option number 1: if the cell is infected by a virion and capable of self-replication of the infected version of itself, then a breeding integration would have occurred where the replicated cells are the "offspring" of the original cell and the viral particle. We call this: Chimeric Replication. For a multi-cellular species these chimerically replicated cells would simply become a mildly alien cell (like a bacterium) within the body capable of producing further versions of itself.

Interestingly, this is exactly one of the optimal outcomes for a genetic therapy treatment that utilizes viral vectors. If a cell type is genetically modified to have or not have a certain property then further self-replication of the modified cell would be advantageous in maintaining the effects of the therapy.

Distributed Self-Organization

However, there is a much scarier fourth outcome for a Virus Organism:

The virions are able to integrate with multiple different foreign cell types (possibly across multiple different organisms) which are then stable and self-replicate their infected versions. These cells would then discover each other and orchestrate with one another such as to generate a persistent multicellular organism that could also choose to produce and emit virions for further growth. In this way, a very large, persistent, organized, and growing parasitic organism would develop. This would be a Viral Organism that is capable of chimeric replication across multiple other (much larger) organisms.

That outcome is particularly scary to say the least.

Virion Networks

And how might self-organization of such complexity occur? One possibility might be through the diversification of Virions produced by infected cells. Just like messages of different types can be sent across a network for different purposes, protocols could be formed by sending Virions of different types between cells. Instead of simply infecting cells, these new Virions would insert genetic code into their corresponding "listener cell" that would enable that cell to produce a proper "response virion" to reinfect the "sender cell".

This is real-time cell-to-cell genetic engineering. It is possible that mechanisms like this exist somewhere in nature, but I am ignorant of any.

However, a synthetically constructed virion network could be used as a computational and or telecommunication mechanism.

It could also potentially be used as a feedback loop genetic therapy where certain virion messengers are produced only upon certain conditions being met and/or the virion messengers being produced carry an encoded state of certain conditions of where they are coming from. But, it would absolutely require sufficient research and testing.

Further Reading

• Are Viruses Just Spores?