Viruses are the most common biological entities on Earth, numbering in the cool billion billion trillions. And while their dependency on full-blown cells relegates them to the realm of pseudo-life, viruses have enormous impacts on other biological communities and the flow of elements and nutrients through global systems.
This realization has spurred research into environmental viruses, the type that infect not human or animal hosts, but microbial ones. The nature of these interactions – t
Source: Discover Magazine