Using genomics, evolutionary biologists test several hypotheses on the origin of viruses. New evidence suggests they may have emerged more times than previously thought. Corroborating the virus-first ...

The Human Virome Program will analyze samples from thousands of volunteers in an effort to understand how viruses affect health. By Carl Zimmer The viruses we know best are the ones that make us sick ...

Some viruses that make us sick are cleared by the immune system within days, while others lurk in our bodies for a lifetime and reemerge later to cause new problems. How and why viral levels in the ...

Some viruses, like the common cold, are a flash in the pan. They infect us, our bodies fight back — which is what makes us sick — and then they’re gone, until the next variant rolls along. Other ...

Viruses are ancient. They have been infecting animals, our ancestors included, for hundreds of millions of years before the first humans ever showed up. And the legacy of those primordial infections ...

Don't feel as if you're out of the loop if you're not up on the terminology of spillover viruses. In fact, one of the doctors we interviewed for this series on spillovers asked, "What is your ...

Besides serving as food for certain microbes, viruses perform some helpful functions that remain poorly understood. A ciliate, a type of single-celled microbe, swims next to Sphagnum moss, amplified ...

First, let’s start with the basics. All living things have a genome. Genomes are made of DNA. Each of your cells has a copy of your genome packed inside of it. You can think of it like an instruction ...