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Nitpick but the step between virus and prion is a viroid; a naked piece of RNA. They mostly exist in plants to my knowledge and are basically the smallest possible infectious disease. The smallest viroids clock in at around 120 base pairs (240 nucleotides).


Prions are like gamma-induced bit flips, Viroids are like small code patches, and Viruses are self-deploying code patches.


What blows my mind is these aren't really analogies, they are in fact mostly truth.


To be precise, these aren’t really analogies, they are in fact similes. :)


To be precise, similes are a type of analogy


What's a virion?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/10/mysterious-p...


A virion is the singular noun for a viral particle. The viral genetic material plus capsid equal an individual virion.


Virion and Viriod are two different things. The former is about 10 to 100 times larger than the later.




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