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Re:Scientists have discovered the first virovore – an organi... by bee_rider on Tuesday January 03, 2023 @06:59PM (#34239911)
Haha, ok. I was thinking by a totally inappropriate analogy — I mean, we “helped” dogs evolve in a direction that lets them work for us better, including things like defending our livestock from wolves and coyotes. But coyotes don’t evolve many orders of magnitude faster than dogs!
Re:Scientists have discovered the first virovore – an organi... by kuhewa on Tuesday January 03, 2023 @10:03PM (#34241457)
It isn't just mutation rate but generation time as well, even with the same mutation rate a virus that replicates several times a day would evolve faster. But there's certainly scope for us to artificially select for traits in virovorous organisms for our own purposes, we commonly do for crop plants to provide viral resistance or tolerance and viruses don't overcome them too quickly. Traditional methods have included x-ray mutagenesis where we crudely induce mutations in a lot of plants and see if any are useful afterward.