Welcome to MCAT Basics, your ultimate guide to the essential topics you need to master for the MCAT,

brought to you by the physicians at med school coach. Every week, Sam Smith breaks down high-yield

MCAT topics, ensuring you're primed for success on test day. Join Sam as we explore the most

crucial subjects outlined by the AAMC, pulled from official practice materials and third-party resources.

Get ready to elevate your MCAT game with topics tailored to maximize your score potential.

Hello, I'm Sam Smith.

The goal of this podcast is to cover the highest yield topics on the MCAT and provide you with

some sort of insight into the questions that the MCAT really likes to ask.

This podcast covers all things viruses.

I first talk about virus structure and then I get into the general viral life cycle.

And then I get a little more specific and I talk about the life cycle of bacteriophages and

retroviruses, which, by the way, both share some similar characteristics. Next, I get into

virus classification, then virus mutation, and then lastly I talk about subviral particles.

This material is mostly going to show up in one of the four sections. That's the

biochem section. As always, I hope this podcast helps as you prep for the MCAT.

So I want to start out by giving just the general definition of a virus.

When I think of a virus, I tend to think of these teeny little particles of some type of matter that cause a ton of damage.

Basically, these evil little things that you can't see but are pretty bad.

The NIH defines a virus a little bit differently.

They define it as a small collection of genetic code,

either DNA or RNA, that is surrounded by a protein coat. Further, they say that viruses cannot replicate alone. Right, viruses must infect cells, host cells, and use components of that cell

to make copies of themselves. Often in this process they end up killing the host cell,

...