First observation of a virus attaching to another virus

Seems like every time people think big things in the body are there for no reason, new developments later show them to be wrong.

I don’t care to say more than the above because I will already get downvoted for even this much.

Citation needed.

It's sort of like there's an engine in your car. But there's not an engine in your engine, there are just parts that together make an engine. None of those parts have car-ness, but together they do. Your car has many parts all working together to make a comfortable and useful car. But the parts of the car if they are separated and just sitting on the bench, just sit there.

Viruses are like those parts, car parts. When they are not in a cell, they just sit there. But if a virus part gets into your car, it gets to participate in the metabolism of the whole car, by acting like one of the other parts and just contributing its part-in-the-system. Unfortunately, the virus part's part-in-the-system is to turn your car into a factory/machine that makes more virus parts. This is how it spreads. This is why you do not want to get a virus.

In this news story, a virus that is missing a piece of how to be a functioning part in your car, attaches to another virus that has that missing piece, and together they behave like a part that knows how to become one of your car parts.

The key to understanding this is, in my mind, to not put labels on things, and just consider how information encoded in genomes moves around. Also, all of the interactions that I've read about between virophages and phages occur inside of a prokaryotic cell, where there are plenty of molecules for making more viruses and powering chemical reactions.

Honestly I'm not sure what to recommend you in terms of books. When I was a biology undergrad I had a biochemistry textbook that, at the time, I found to be mostly inscrutable. Then as a grad student I was going back through it to refresh my memory for a class I was TAing and remarked, "this is incredibly straightforward and clear" and immediately realized how much I must have changed. All of this to say - learning biology via text is pretty hard and takes a long time. I've never used it, but smart biology (https://www.smart-biology.com/) looks very promising.

I think the biggest way that the field of biology fails humanity is that we communicate relationships between these incredibly complex machines with little cartoons of a circle and triangle bumping into each other or something like that. Once you get the intuition for how things behave on a molecular level it's a super efficient means of communicating, but for people joining the field it's just brutal.

But if you want to understand viruses you really need to understand biochemistry and molecular biology first. If you already have that background then I can ask around for book recommendations, if not, I would try smart biology, or if you really want a book, Lehninger is the classic biochemistry book, Alberts Molecular Biology of the cell is the classic cell biology book. These aren't intro books though, you typically wouldn't get them until your 2nd or 3rd year in a university program. It's easy to find free PDFs on the internet if you find their outrageous prices a bit high.

These are the same.

Viruses are closer to self propogating exploitations of protein creation mechanisms. They cause their proteins to be replicated by these mechanisms, and statistics takes care of the rest, clicking the fragments together, creating a new virus, floating about, using other exploitations along the way, and the process repeats. In all stages, there're "just" bits of protein.

Theoretically not producing spendable energy would not exclude activity either as long as some previously made energy is spent.

You stand overlooking a giant office park with lots of stand-alone offices. A storm swirls trash among them, though trash doesn't last long in the wind and wet. Your goal is to create steady-state trash.

So you design a packet. An envelope with tape (so it sticks when blown against glass front doors), and an address label (to get it carried inside, rather than being ignored as trash, or trashed as spam). And then you fold that envelope around hopefully-persuasive instructions for photocopying envelope and instructions, and assembling new packets. Then you make a lot of them. Few will reach doors, few will get inside, few will be executed.

There are a bunch of design tradeoffs. The address can spam or spear-fish. A "<blur> Trucking" address works well with trucking companies, and poorly with others. A "<blur> Accounts Dept" works less well, but more broadly. You can include helpful envelope folding templates, but that means making fewer larger packets with more to go wrong when assembling them. You can go for stealth, only one person in the corner making packets and tossing them out the window, or even getting the instructions inserted into to the company process manual. Or you can go for fast private-equity zombie-apocalypse takeover, where the whole company dedicates itself to production until it explodes, scattering scads of packets to the wind. Zombies are the common case. Our human genome manual is littered with inserts.

You might put an inter-departmental envelope within the envelope with a specific destination - trading lack of generality for performance. You might include a photocopier how to - buying "no worries, I've brought my own" generality at a cost of size and complexity. But the complexity budget is tight. Each extra badly-photocopied page ups the odds of a broken packet.

Offices don't want to become zombies. So they keep their sprinklers running, to degrade packet trash. They toss out port-a-potties that feel like front doors to decoy packets. People run around the office with scissors, chopping up paper that looks spamish - you might want your instructions to fire them early on. Employees refuse instructions that don't look right. Out of common cause with sister offices, if someone notices the office going zombie, they may pull a fire alarm, burning down the office. It's a hard hard life being spam. And not easy being an office either.

Looking out over a shallow coastal city... it's a burning trash-filled hellscape warzone. The half-life of functional packets is like an hour. The half-life of bacterial office buildings is only a couple of days.

Asides: Some envelopes can punch a hole through the door to inject instructions. The time between insertion and resistance-is-only-a-delaying-action can be short - seconds to minutes. The zombie buildings explode within an hour or day.

> how do these satellite viruses then survive off of other viruses?

Small and simple, and easy to build, are nice design goals. As simple as possible but no simpler - taking over offices is hard after all. But what if the office is already being taken over, by someone else? The C-suite has been sent golfing, and the scissor snippers fired. Now in that altered environment, your even simpler or more general instructions might survive and grab a slice of production, or even takeover the takeover. Parasite parasites. Think of the ecological interactions of memes - "I might not have believed <improbable A> yesterday, but now, after encountering <conspiracy theory B> this morning...". And if two different packet designs are being photocopied at the same time, hey, mixups happen. Or consider a label of "Important Mandatory Instructions from the Fire Marshall - OPEN IMMEDIATELY" - highly persuasive... when someone else is causing nearby offices to burn down. The complex interactions of living in a warzone.

Art imitates life