What is permanent ecosystem?

What is the place of viruses in the ecosystem?

• What is the biological purpose of viruses (other than to make living things miserable)? Do they have any beneficial purpose whatsoever, like some bacteria do? Are they a part of the ecosystem, like bacteria are? Do any living things feed on them (for instance, you could say mosquitos are parasites, but bats eat them)? If viruses aren't part of the ecosystem, and serve no beneficial purpose, can we completely eradicate them? What's stopping us? The fear that some will survive and mutate into super viruses? I understand that there will be a few people out there who will say "population control" (both in people and other living things) but don't we already have enough other factors causing death in living things like other diseases, pollution, war, accidents, loss of animals' habitat, etc? How did viruses originate? Scientific viewpoints only, please--I am really curious. If anyone has some latest research articles to share please post.

• Answer:

  There are a few viruses that we make use of. Some viruses atack bacteria and these are sometimes used to treat people who wre infected by those bacteria. Bacteriophages, which are bacteria-specific viruses, are very useful as antibiotics ...and as microbes become progressively more resistant to existing antimicrobial drugs, they are looking more and more attractive as an option. It's also worth bearing in mind that viruses acts as biological ferries that can carry genes between different organisms and even different species. They can, therefore, contribute to genetic diversity. For instance there is a sacoglossan sea slug that contains plant genes capable of keeping chloroplasts (photosynthetic organs) alive in the slug's body. These slugs eat algae (marine plants) and move the chloroplasts from the algae to their skin where they are used to capture energy from the Sun for the slug. Scientists suspect that, at some point, a virus was responsible for accidentally adding the correct genes from plants to the slug's DNA, enabling this clever trick to take place. So viruses, whilst making us ill on and off, also contribute to evolution and diversity and therefore make the world a genetically better place!