Microbiology: A Systems Approach 4th Edition by Marjorie Kelly Cowan

Exercise 2

Critical thinking is the ability to reason and solve problems using facts and concepts. These questions can be approached from a number of angles and, in most cases, they do not have a single correct answer.
a. You identify a novel microbe in your laboratory and find that it possesses two types of nucleic acid. Explain why you immediately rule out the fact that this microbe is a virus.
b. Describe the nucleic acid configuration of a positive-sense RNA virus and explain why its multiplication cycle is less complex than that of a retrovirus.