In a retrovirus, the RNA turns viral; it has contracted a virus. The viral RNA is equipped with a special enzyme that causes a process called reverse transcriptase, which turns the RNA into DNA. In other words, the virus causes the process to go in the opposite, or reverse, direction from the typical genetic process by which DNA instructs RNA. Here RNA has become DNA, and that DNA integrates into the nucleus of the cell and into an organism’s own DNA. Thus this virus has essentially co-opted the organism to make copies of itself—copies that are hard to detect. It squirts out of the cell as
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