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They do have energy producing mechanisms: cells! The key to understanding this is, in my mind, to not put labels on things, and just consider how information encoded in genomes moves around. Also, all of the interactions that I've read about between virophages and phages occur inside of a prokaryotic cell, where there are plenty of molecules for making more viruses and powering chemical reactions. Honestly I'm not sure what to recommend you in terms of books. When I was a biology undergrad I had a biochemistry textbook that, at the time, I found to be mostly inscrutable. Then as a grad student I was going back through it to refresh my memory for a class I was TAing and remarked, "this is incredibly straightforward and clear" and immediately realized how much I must have changed. All of this to say - learning biology via text is pretty hard and takes a long time. I've never used it, but smart biology (https://www.smart-biology.com/) looks very promising. I think the biggest way that the field of biology fails humanity is that we communicate relationships between these incredibly complex machines with little cartoons of a circle and triangle bumping into each other or something like that. Once you get the intuition for how things behave on a molecular level it's a super efficient means of communicating, but for people joining the field it's just brutal. But if you want to understand viruses you really need to understand biochemistry and molecular biology first. If you already have that background then I can ask around for book recommendations, if not, I would try smart biology, or if you really want a book, Lehninger is the classic biochemistry book, Alberts Molecular Biology of the cell is the classic cell biology book. These aren't intro books though, you typically wouldn't get them until your 2nd or 3rd year in a university program. It's easy to find free PDFs on the internet if you find their outrageous prices a bit high. |