It’s ScienceTyme! With Prof. Losanjealous

You could have been looking at literally billions of different things. But I’m going to guess that it was the cross-section of a virus, a Tobacco Mosaic virus perhaps. What caught your attention was the similarity between the crust of the Pizza Hut Cheesy Bites Pizza^TM; and the virus’s shell of proteinaceous capsids. They both look roughly like a necklace of golf balls.

But the similarities end there, Henry. Think of capsids as little shields that protect the virus’s RNA. When the virus enters a human cell, the higher salinity of the cell’s endoplasm weakens the binding energy between the capsids–the virus’s “cheesy bites.” They break apart, releasing the RNA into the host cell. This RNA “hijacks” the host DNA, causing it to create new viruses instead of new cells. The viruses multiply until the cell explodes and the process begins all over again. When you eat the crust of the Cheesy Bites Pizza^TM, on the other hand–nothing happens. You may feel like you’re going to explode, Henry, but you’re not going to create thousands of new pizzas. At least Prof. Losanjealous hopes not.