In Todd's opinion, there is no other microorganism in the world with such a strange form as a tyrant.
After magnifying the sample to tens of thousands of times, Tyrant looks a bit like a native phage virus. Its head is a huge cyst, which is used to load DNA fragments, and its body is a thick straight virus.
The stem and tail are hundreds or thousands of extra-long tubes that resemble octopus tentacles.
In order to test the physiological characteristics of the Tyrant virus, Todd specially designed a set of in vivo experiments.
Twelve white mice were divided into four groups, three in each group, as follows:
The first group of experimental subjects did nothing and were very ordinary white rats.
The second group was injected with abnormal bacteria.
The third group was injected with Sutherland Archaea and Allergic Bacteria at the same time, but the ratio of the two was controlled within a certain range to ensure that no mutations would occur.
The fourth group was injected with Sutherland archaea and abnormal bacteria, but the number of abnormal bacteria exceeded the carrying capacity of the archaea, deliberately causing mutations in the experimental subjects.
These four groups of experimental subjects correspond to the four categories of people: ordinary people, ordinary mutant people, normal successors, and mutated successors.
The Tyrant virus was injected into the bodies of four groups of mice. After a period of time, all the experimental subjects showed changes.
The first group of experimental subjects, representing ordinary people, developed high fever, vomiting, convulsions, fainting, and finally all died within thirty minutes after being injected with the virus.
The second group of experimental subjects, representing ordinary mutant species, met the same fate as the first group, and all died.
The third group of experimental subjects, representing normal successors, finally failed to escape the fate of death after ten hours of struggle.
As for the last group of experimental subjects representing the mutated successors, after being injected with Tyrant, the body's mutations gradually stopped, and the body surface and organs returned to normal, retaining basic external stress capabilities.
What's going on?
Todd picked out one mouse from each of the four groups of experiments and began to perform anatomy tests.
Opening the skull of the first white mouse, Todd was shocked by the situation inside. Although the brain had stopped functioning, the cortical cells in the brain were all covered by a shrinking black mesh-like membrane.
It looked like someone had tightly covered the entire nervous system of the experimental subject with a layer of black plastic wrap.
Todd put slices of the rat's brain under a microscope, and after some observation, he finally obtained the tyrant's physiological data.
The working principle of tyrants is somewhat similar to that of bacteriophages. They use protein tentacles to land on the cell surface, then penetrate the cell nucleus to extract high-quality DNA fragments in the cell, and then suck these DNA into the virus's vesicle for preservation.
When it completes phagocytosis of a group of cells, it will select the next group of targets to continue the process.
When the number of DNA fragments in the cyst reaches a certain amount, the tyrant virus will stop phagocytosis and instead act like a larvae making a cocoon, using surrounding free proteins and other nutritional tissues to create a large spherical virus nest.
The process of birth of this sphere is the most incredible part for Todd.
Tens of thousands of tyrant viruses gather together, extending their respective protein tentacles to the limit, and each two viruses use the ends of the tentacles to overlap each other, forming a hollow tubular channel as a bridge. So many viruses are connected to each other through
The tentacle pipes together form a three-dimensional grid-shaped spherical virus nest.
What happened next was the most exciting scene.
The tyrant virus transmits the DNA fragments from the head to the tentacles of the tail through the virus stem, and then transmits them to the heads of other viruses through the pipes built by the tentacles. It is like a high-speed three-dimensional pipe network, and the viruses are constantly connected.
DNA exchange and screening is going on.
In this process, the tyrant activates all the dormant non-coding region genes in the DNA and replicates them in large quantities. Then, these tyrant viruses are like pickers on the workshop assembly line, comparing and checking the fully activated DNA fragments, and throwing them away.
Remove those inferior and useless fragments, leaving those high-quality parts, and finally reassemble these fragments in the virus nest to form a new, evolved biological gene.
But for some unknown reason, most of the genes in existing organisms have been classified as inferior and useless genes by the Tyrant Virus, which also resulted in the death of all the experimental subjects in the first three groups.
Now that the working principle of Tyrant Virus has been clarified, let’s talk about its love-and-kill relationship with Sutherland Archaea.
Sutherland Archaea is a very special type of bacteria. When it is in its normal state, it is not much different from other bacteria, and its defense function cannot resist the invasion of the tyrant virus.
However, when it mutates, drastic physiological changes will occur within the bacteria, and a very special catalytic enzyme will be produced on the surface. The main function of this catalytic enzyme, which is mainly composed of proteins, is to greatly improve cell activity and promote archaea.
The process of mutation and provides energy for the entire mutation. But this enzyme also has an interesting side effect - they use their own enzyme proteins to temporarily protect the main tissues of the organism from damage when the tyrant virus invades.
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The fourth group of experimental subjects, those mutated successors, did not die because of the catalytic enzyme secreted by the mutated Sutherland archaea.
Moreover, when the confrontation between viruses and archaea reaches the final stage, the tyrant virus will stop eating and instead connect to each other to form a virus nest to assemble and release those evolutionary genes. The Sutherland archaea also consumes a large amount of catalytic enzymes.
The mutation process was thus terminated, and the archaea returned to its normal state and began to accumulate new enzyme proteins.
Does this process sound complicated?
If the Sutherland Archaea and Tyrant Virus are compared to a couple, it will be much easier to understand.
The Tyrant Virus is a bad-tempered wife who always turns the family upside down over trivial matters. As the husband, Sutherland Archaea is usually a strict wife, swallowing her anger and not daring to resist, but as long as she drinks a few sips
Drinking wine gives you courage in your body, and you dare to fight with your wife. But after a lot of fighting, the couple always reconciles in the end.
After understanding the working principle of Tyrant Virus and its relationship with Sutherland Archaea, Todd finally understood a series of anomalies caused by this strange virus.
In the laboratory log, Todd wrote the preliminary research results of the Tyrant virus:
1. The definition of Tyrant: This is a virus similar to a bacteriophage, which can assemble into new evolutionary genes by extracting DNA fragments from other microorganisms.
Second, the tyrant engulfs normal cells, plunders the DNA fragments in the cells, and stores them in his own body.
Third, tyrant viruses can connect to each other, combine and build virus nests, and activate, screen, recombine and assemble DNA fragments in the nest, ultimately generating new and evolved biological genes.
Fourth, ordinary people, ordinary mutants and unmutated successors, after coming into contact with the tyrant, will be devoured by the cells in the body tissue and eventually die.
5. As for the mutated successors, the mutated Sutherland archaea in their bodies can produce a catalytic enzyme that maintains the mutation process. This enzyme can resist tyrant phagocytosis. When the tyrant reaches a certain upper limit in phagocytes
, the virus will stop attacking, form a virus nest, and begin to
During this period, the catalytic enzymes of the mutated archaea are consumed to a certain extent due to their resistance to viruses, and the entire mutation process will be terminated at the same time. The archaea will transform back into its normal form and begin to accumulate again.
Enzyme proteins are also prepared to defend against the next viral attack.
Sixth, strange creatures such as griffins and manticores should have mutated and then been exposed to the Tyrant Virus, which ultimately caused the genes in their bodies to evolve and become what they are today.