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Virus SexIn order to reproduce, viruses need to invade a living host and make copies of themselves. One of the deadliest ways they do this occurs when different kinds of virus invade at the same time. You might call it virus sex. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.McDonald: You imagine two different influenza viruses will get into a cell instead of just one. And what happens during that process is these two different viruses are able to mix their genetic material and the new virus that's made from that infected cell is essentially a derivative of both the different parent virus that co-infected that cell.Virologist Sarah McDonald. McDonald: It's essentially analogous to sexual reproduction in which you have two different parents: those parents combine their genetic material in a way to make, here, a baby virus. That baby virus has genetic material from both parents. And this process of reassortment for influenza is the mechanism by which pandemic strains are generated.So pandemic influenza - most people know the 1918, 1919 Spanish influenza strain. That was a strain that was estimated to cause upwards of fifty million deaths around the world. The more recent one that we probably remember is the 2009 swine flu pandemic that was much less lethal. Essentially, both of those viruses were created via this very rudimentary sexual reproduction mechanism.Pulse of the Planet is made possible in part by Virginia Tech, inventing the future through a hands-on approach to education and research.