About Virology

Virology is the study of viruses, complexes of nucleic acids and proteins that have the capacity for replication in animal, plant and bacterial cells. Viruses come in two basic types, those that have a genome of DNA and those that have a genome of RNA. It focuses on the following aspects of viruses: their structure, classification and evolution, their ways to infect and exploit host cells for reproduction, their interaction with host organism physiology and immunity, the diseases they cause, the techniques to isolate and culture them, and their use in research and therapy. Virology is considered to be a subfield of microbiology or of medicine.