On mutation and namings

Viruses are unusual; unlike other organisms which always use DNA to pass information between generations, viral genetic material isn’t always DNA. Some viruses use RNA, which human cells mostly use to transmit information from the nucleus to the machinery that makes proteins. These differences in the way in which viruses encode their genes have a profound impact on viral evolution. When human cells make copies of themselves, they use proofreading to ensure that the DNA copies are identical to the original code, this reduces the rate of mutation. However, viruses that use RNA to transmit their genes lack this proof-reading capacity, leading to a much higher mutation rate. Whilst this can be deleterious for an individual offspring virus, for the population as a whole it is extremely effective. This comes down to numbers, higher species only produce limited numbers of offspring, so each one needs to be as good possible. Viruses go for safety in numbers, really big numbers. Each infected cell produces approximately 10,000 new viruses. Therefore, there is a huge stock of different offspring, a small number of which will be fitter than their parents. This high degree of mutation means it can be tricky to apply the Linnaean system to group viruses. We can loosely group viruses on a range of different characteristics or the similarity of their genes, but because they change all the bloody time, they are hard to pin down exactly.

Viruses can be named after the disease they cause: influenza virus is named after influenza and yellow fever virus after yellow fever, this is admittedly confusing, but reflects how the disease was known before the causative agent. Alternatively, viruses are named after the part of the body they infect, in Greek to make it sound more sciencey, hence rhinovirus rather than nose virus (rhino is the Greek word for nose). Finally, viruses have been named the geographical region where they were discovered (Ebola after the Ebola river, Lassa after a village in Nigeria). The geographical naming of viruses stopped due to the stigma attached, which is why SARS-CoV-2 took three months to be named and wasn’t called Wuhan virus. Though a different approach has been used recently of using Greek letters for the SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern.

 Excerpt from Infectious: Pathogens and how we fight them