The virus and its genus were both named after Zaire (which is now the domestic Republic of the Congo), the country where it was first observed. It is suspected to be very close to Marburg virus. In 2010 it is renamed as “Ebola virus” to circumvent confusion. The natural reservoir of the virus is bats and in particular fruit bats. The virus spreads y direct contact with blood or body fluids of an infected human or animal. Airborne virus has not been observed yet. The incubation period or the period, in which the virus has entered the body but has not been produced observable symptoms, is roughly 4 to 10 …show more content…
They must hijack a cell and use a combination of both host-encoded and virally encoded enzymes and proteins, along with host-cell structures to generate multiple copies of themselves. These particles then self-assemble into what we would see under a microscope as virus. The symptoms of a viral infection then ensue partly due to the next phase of a virus that follows self-assembly: budding and lysis. The now assembled virus exists the cell and can induce cellular damage and death. In the first phase of infection, the Ebola virus (or any virus for that matter) must first gain entry into a cell. It is usually done through the agonistic stimulation of a host-receptor. Usually with viruses that have an envelope surrounding the virion, it is observed that those viruses gain entry into the cell via endocytosis. This is the case with Ebola. The virus attacks the host by attaching to host receptors using the glycoproteins studded in the envelope and is endocytosed into macrophagosomes. In order to fully penetrate the cytosol, the viral membrane must then fuse with the vesicle membrane, thereby releasing the nucleocapsid into the cytosol. As we already have discussed, the genomic negative sense ssRNA is utilized as a template for the synthesis of monocistronic mRNAs, and, using the host ribosomes and tRNA molecules, the mRNA is translated into viral proteins. As the viral protein levels