As the U.S. faces down the COVID-19 Delta variant – now fast-becoming the nation's dominant strain – reports of a new Lambda variant that first emerged in Peru in August 2020 are gaining the attention ...

A new University of California San Diego study published in Cell challenges a long-standing assumption about how animal viruses become capable of sparking human epidemics and pandemics. Using a ...

161,979 new RNA viruses have been discovered using a machine learning tool that researchers believe will vastly improve the mapping of life on Earth and could aid in the identification of many ...

Live virus vaccines use a weakened virus to help your body fight the real disease. Some people, like those who are very sick or pregnant, should not get live virus vaccines. A live virus vaccine ...

Besides serving as food for certain microbes, viruses perform some helpful functions that remain poorly understood. A ciliate, a type of single-celled microbe, swims next to Sphagnum moss, amplified ...

A number of factors influence the way the virulence of a virus — that is, how harmful it is to its host — affects its ability to survive and spread; in some cases, higher virulence may help a virus ...