What Is Coronavirus
The coronavirus is a big family of pathogens that only infect animals. A coronavirus gets its name from how these pathogens exhibit spikes that resemble the angles of a crown The name coronavirus is derived from the Latin corona, meaning crown or halo, which refers to the characteristic appearance reminiscent of a crown or a solar corona around the virions (virus particles) when viewed under two-dimensional transmission electron microscopy, due to the surface covering in club-shaped protein spikes. Some of them cause mild illnesses like the common cold. Others can cause fatal infections.. They are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome and a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry. The genome size of coronaviruses ranges from approximately 27 to 34 kilobases, the largest among known RNA viruses. This is a class of virus that is known to mutate easily. MERS and SARS both began as infections in bats before mutating to infect humans. They had evolved in their animal hosts to infect humans. The type that infects humans was first identified in the 1960s. Since then, seven human-infecting types of coronavirus have been identified, including 2019-nCoV, also known as Wuhan Coronavirus. This virus resembles other serious human coronavirus types MERS and SARS in that all belong to the beta subgrouping of virus. They are associated with the common cold, pneumonia, and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and can also affect the gut.
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This story is from the March - April 2020 edition of Scientific India.
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This story is from the March - April 2020 edition of Scientific India.
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