What's the difference between a virus and a bacteria?

[padanarm]

What's the difference between a virus and a bacteria? What makes a bacterium a form of life whereas a virus is just a bunch of chemicals?

[Clanad]

This is the best discussion of your subject I've seen:

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-difference -between-a-virus-and-a-bacteria.htm

I usually don't like posting links alone, but there's no use in recapturing an already well explained subect...

[rov1200]

Viruses are put together with genes just like any other organism including bacteria. Professor Fred Sanger won a nobel prize in the 60's for decoding a form of virus IX 174. It was a single stranded DNA had 8 genes and made up of approx 6000 letters A.C.G.T.

To keep the number of nucleotides to a minimum genes were written inside genes. Remarkable piece of design because the start of each gene begins with ATG and depending where the gene is being read from allows this compression.

Viruses are a major problem in causing diseases but with enough effort they could be eradicated which has happened with the Smallpox virus.eg

Smallpox (also called variola) is the only disease that has been completely wiped out throughout the world. Smallpox is also potentially one of the most devastating biological weapons ever conceived.

[Clanad]

Pedantically, as rov states, the Smallpox virus, apparently has been eradicated since about 1980. I say apparently because two sites worldwide are known to have live samples of the virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Ga., and the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Russia.

A study done about the destiny of these samples was conducted in the last few years as fears of bio-terroism increased, should the sample fall into the wrong hands. Although smallpox has killed an estimate 300 million people over the history of the western world, few, if any people today have immunity to the virus. Worse, even considering that "...smallpox is probably one of the most feared pathogens in history, we understand almost nothing about what it does or how it causes disease. And we have no drugs to treat it..." according to Dr. Grant McFadden, Professor, department of molecular genetics and microbiology, University of Florida, College of Medicine,Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, University of Florida, College of Medicine.

A paper Dr. McFadden and colleagues have produced is still under peer review...

[padanarm]

Thanks Clanad, that link was useful.

The gist of the article seems to be that a bacteria is a living creature that can be killed, whereas a virus can only be stopped by the immune system developing a defence.

[rov1200]

Sorry, wrong posting!