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A comment on Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims. Parent comment

Re:Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, See... by zaarn on Monday December 10, 2018 @01:01PM (#18649779)
Nitpick but the step between virus and prion is a viroid; a naked piece of RNA. They mostly exist in plants to my knowledge and are basically the smallest possible infectious disease. The smallest viroids clock in at around 120 base pairs (240 nucleotides).
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Re:Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, See... by tossandturn on Monday December 10, 2018 @04:29PM (#18651311)
Prions are like gamma-induced bit flips, Viroids are like small code patches, and Viruses are self-deploying code patches.
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Re:Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, See... by jvanderbot on Monday December 10, 2018 @05:13PM (#18651585)
What blows my mind is these aren't really analogies, they are in fact mostly truth.
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Re:Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, See... by thinkpad20 on Monday December 10, 2018 @07:26PM (#18652359)
To be precise, these aren’t really analogies, they are in fact similes. :)
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Re:Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, See... by kenbellows on Monday December 10, 2018 @07:47PM (#18652465)
To be precise, similes are a type of analogy
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Re:Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, See... by selimthegrim on Monday December 10, 2018 @06:16PM (#18651970)
What's a virion?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/10/mysterious-p...

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Re:Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, See... by arkades on Monday December 10, 2018 @08:50PM (#18652771)
A virion is the singular noun for a viral particle. The viral genetic material plus capsid equal an individual virion.
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Re:Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, See... by zaarn on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @01:51AM (#18653619)
Virion and Viriod are two different things. The former is about 10 to 100 times larger than the later.
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