How Virus were discovered - In tobacco plants

[packman]

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When a blight of mosaic disease threatened European tobacco crops in the mid-1800s, plant pathologists set out to identify its root cause. For decades, only one forward-thinking botanist, Martinus Beijerinck, realized the source was neither a bacterial nor a fungal infection, but something completely different: a virus.

Today, we know that viruses can be found nearly anywhere in the air, oceans and soil. A tiny percentage of these are dangerous pathogens that cause disease, such as the current coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 causing a worldwide pandemic. Yet the study of viruses started not in medical science, but in botany, the study of plants. Viruses are so small—and so strange—that it would take decades for scientific consensus to agree that they exist at all.


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Transmission electron microscopic image of an isolate from the first U.S. case of COVID-19, formerly known as 2019-nCoV. The spherical viral particles, colorized blue, contain cross-sections through the viral genome, seen as black dots. (CDC)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-are-viruses-history-tobacco-mosaic-disease-180974480/

[cayugafalls]

1. That image of COVID-19 is scary!

The virii are so small, imagine trillions of them in your lungs...sheesh, I just freaked myself out.

I need a break.

Stay well.