Now, as I mentioned earlier viruses cannot actually reproduce on their own and this is because they did not contain the proper machinery to actually reproduce and create the molecules needed for reproduction and division. For example, viruses do not have ribosomes and that means they cannot themselves produce proteins. However, instead of actually replicating and dividing on their own our viruses can actually infect living cells and use the machinery, the organelles of the living cells to actually reproduce and divide and form other viruses. So one very common example of a virus, one very common type of a virus is a bacteriophage. And a bacteriophage is a virus that only targets and infects bacterial cells. So basically, the structure of our bacteriophage looks something like this.