Viral life cycle

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Viral life cycle" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Influenza virus life cycle
Entry Replication Latency Shedding

Viruses are only able to replicate themselves by commandeering the reproductive apparatus of cells and making them reproduce the virus's genetic structure and particles instead. How viruses do this depends mainly on the type of nucleic acid DNA or RNA they contain, which is either one or the other but never both. Viruses cannot function or reproduce outside a cell, and are totally dependent on a host cell to survive. Most viruses are species specific, and related viruses typically only infect a narrow range of plants, animals, bacteria, or fungi.^[1]