Eli5: why do bacteriophages look like tiny robots?

Question

They look so surreal. Like they were build or sth. And they arent even alive.

In: 25

Answer 1

So viruses, like you said, aren’t really living things. They’re basically microscopic mechanical contraptions that inject an RNA molecule into a cell.

Sort of like tiny landmines, they just float around until they bump into a cell they can latch onto, at which point the whole process happens mechanically. It clamps on and dumps the RNA into the cell

At that point the cell sees the RNA and goes “Oh look, instructions to build something out of proteins” which it follows until it explodes like an overinflated balloon, sending more of these protein based machines out to infect more cells.

So in a sense, they are robots, or at least machines. They’re just made of proteins instead of metal.