> You can observe them infecting and lysing cells in real time. Where? How? > proving Koch's postulates for at least one virus is trivial. I thought Koch's p

> You can observe them infecting and lysing cells in real time. Where? How? > proving Koch's postulates for at least one virus is trivial. I thought Koch's postulates were too strict for virologists... And hence were relaxed. (lol) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5182102/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5182102/ Can you show a somewhere the old postulates are all met for a virus? > It doesn't depend on genome sequencing. That just helps us understand what proteins they make and why they vary. And, not totally unimportant, to ID the particle we're looking at. > While both can be used in virology, the trend is for serum-free media and generally you want to use human cells when studying human viruses. Nice trend. Now can they also truly isolate (that is without other DNA/RNA carrying particles present) a virus? Like biologists have done with other biological particles of similar size? Because without true isolation you could always be looking at "dead cell debris" or other stuff that is there and is not the virus, but may look like one. > After all, human cells may contain dormant viruses or viral genomes, so you want to make sure that your controls are identical such that your intentionally infected cells are the only ones that show viral activity. Bingo! So as long as you put "culture" cells in the sample and call that an isolate, it is polluting the sample. > you'd be better served asking what you can do to prove that viruses exist? Isolate them. Truly isolate them. > I used to joke that mouse deer didn't actually exist. That they were just jackelopes that the taxidermists made up for the museum of natural history. I bet that I could have made that very convincing with a lot of rhetoric. A visit, however, to a zoo with said ungulates alive and in the flesh would quickly prove me wrong. Because in the zoo you can see the animal all by itself. Now if you say you can only see deer mouse when they are in a soup with 50 other species of mouse, and you make a crummy black white pictures of the soup claiming some provide proof of your deer mouse: should I take you seriously?