I need help with viruses vs. bacteria..?

Question

how does a virus vs, bacteria:

Growth

Obtaining Food

Transport of Materials

Energy Release

Metabolic Production

Gas Exchange

Water Balance

Typical Habitat

Response to Environment

Movement

Disease

Usefulness

Answer 1

Everything up to and including movement really only applies to bacteria.  Bacteria are alive, and contain all of the self-regulatory mechanisms necessary to survive on their own.  Viruses, on the other hand, are simply DNA or RNA packaged into a protein that's designed to inject it's contents into a living cell, where the virus 'hijacks' the cells own mechanisms for its own purposes.

For example, if you were to place a single bacterium onto a petri dish containing the right nutrients, the bacterium would eat, grow, metabolize, multiply, and multiply some more, resulting in a petri dish full of bacteria.  If you were to place a virus in a similar dish, it would do nothing and simply sit there, since it's not alive and has no metabolic processes of its own.  Place that same virus into a dish full of bacteria, though, and it will infect the bacteria, using their cell machinery to reproduce, possibly killing the bacteria in the process.  If the bacteria were wiped out, then the virus would go back to being inert, having nothing to hijack.

Both bacteria and viruses cause disease, but they tend to go about it in different ways.  The finer points are beyond me, since I never did so well in immunology.  One of the big points, though, is that antibiotics work in treating bacterial infections, but not viral infections.  This is because bacteria have their own metabolic systems, which antibiotics can attack.  Viruses, on the other hand, hijack our cells.  There are some antiviral medications that can inhibit this, but they also tend to harm our own cells in the process.

Finally, both bacteria and viruses are useful.  Bacteria act as decomposers, breaking down dead biomatter and recycling it into the ecosystem.  They also have a symbiotic role in many organisms, including humans (a type of E. coli lives in your large intestines, feeding off of some of your undigested nutrients and producing new, important nutrients in the process).  

Viruses, on the other hand, may seem useless, but they perform an important role in evolution and adaptation, mostly in bacteria.  When viruses replicate themselves and leave the host cell, sometimes they take a little bit of the host's DNA with them.  When the virus infects the next host, that DNA can be injected as well.  If the second host survives, then it may end up with an extra gene or two, possibly providing an evolutionary advantage (such as allowing the new host to feed off of a different food source, or providing resistance to a certain type of antibiotic).

Answer 2

Viruses are actually just rogue bits of genetic information, contained within a crude 'shell', while bacteria are a full-fledged lifeform.  There is some debate amongst biologists over whether or not viruses are actually 'alive'.

Viruses are like the borg of the real world.

Answer 3

Virus is only a piece of genetic information in a capsule. It does't growth, obtain food, exchange gas etc. It only reproduces after invasion in a cell using enzymes etc. from this cell to multiplicate. Then it destroys the cell and goes into and so on.

Diseases are caused by both of bacteria and viruses. Both are usually very resistant to bad envinronment. Typical habitat: both are everywhere.