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Introducction
A virus is a small piece of infectious nucleic acid wrapped inside proteins. It contains either deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) or ribonucleic acid (RNA), but never both. It lacks many biochemical functions and is forced to be an intracellular parasite. Whilst it is outside of a living cell it is an inert biochemical complex, but within a cell "it comes alive". Viruses are non-motile and depend on external physical factors in order to spread to other susceptible cells to infect. Viruses are broadly classified by their type of genome, e.g. Retroviruses are a special category of RNA virus that require reverse transcription of their RNA to DNA and then integration of that DNA into the host cell genome before replication can take place. The means by which replication of viruses takes place are of special interest to health care workers who are at risk of exposure to bloodborne viruses in patients' blood or blood stained body fluids. An understanding of the replication of viruses will help the understanding of how antiretroviral drugswork.
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