Originally Posted by Malachi

I love the smell of tabloid science journalism in the morning.

The mimivirus is an odd breed but unlike any other thing that we call "alive" lacks some essential metabolic tricks which makes it completely dependent upon a host for replication. There are aspects of it which are novel, and may even alter some niggling little details about how we humans partition the one true tree of life, but then again that has always been about our naming schemes than about anything real.

When the mimivirus attacks a host amoeba, it directs the production of what are very much like prokaryotic cells, borrowing all kinds of machinery from the host. It is these psuedo-cells that become infected by the parasitic virii (or colds). The virus itself isn't infected because it can't be, there is nothing to "infect" in any sense we have of the term.

I wouldn't call it groundbreaking, but - if you are me - it's still pretty interesting.