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Viruses: Do I Belong in the Six Kingdoms
This assignment is to discuss the classification of viruses with the six kingdoms of life, which kingdoms does it belong to if any, if they don’t belong to any kingdom why. All living things can be classified in one of the six kingdoms; they all share five basic properties. The five basic properties are: cellular organization, metabolism, homeostasis, growth and reproduction, and heredity. Biologists have assigned all living things to six groups called Kingdoms. The six kingdoms are Archaea, Bacteria, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia. Archaea is the kingdom of prokaryotes; simple cells that don’t have nuclei; they include methanogen, which fabricates methane. Bacteria are second in the prokaryotes, they are typically a few micrometers in length and come in a wide range of shapes; they range from spheres to rods and spirals. Protista mostly include unicellular organisms that don’t fit in the other kingdoms, the cells contain a nucleus. Most live in water, like algae, though some live in moist soil or even the human body. Fungi contain nonphotosynthetic organisms, most or multicellular and they digest food externally. Plantae contain photosynthetic multicellular organisms, precise numbers are difficult to determine, but as of 2010, there are thought to be 300–315 thousand species of plants, of which the great majority, some 260–290 thousand, are seed plants. Animalia are nonphotosynthetic organisms, they are also multicellular like the fungi kingdom, but they digest there food internally. Viruses are very small infectious agent, they do not possess the ability to reproduce, but can replicate within cells using the hosts cells DNA. For the simple reason that they cannot reproduce, biologists have not classified them into the kingdoms of life. Viruses on the other hand, do not satisfy the criteria for “living” because they possess only a portion of the