American virologist Howard Temin proposed the provirus hypothesis. The hypothesis arose from Temin's observations that the Rous sarcoma virus, which has ribonucleic acid (RNA) as its core genetic material, could not infect a cell once the cell's...

A provirus is a virus genome that has integrated itself into the DNA of a host cell. One kind of virus that can become a provirus is a retrovirus. When a retrovirus invades a cell, the RNA of the retrovirus is transcribed into DNA by reverse...