The abiotic property of virus is

Concept — the living and the non-living side of a virus

A virus sits on the borderline between living and non-living matter. Its biotic (living) side appears only inside a host cell: there its genome is replicated and its proteins are made by the host cell's machinery, so that thousands of new particles of its own kind are produced. Its abiotic (non-living) side is what it is outside a host — an acellular particle with no protoplasm, no organelles and no metabolism, which behaves like an ordinary chemical substance. The sharpest test of such inert chemical matter is whether it can be purified and packed into a regular, repeating crystal lattice, a state to which no cell or organism can ever be reduced.

Application to this question

1. Outside a host cell a virus exists as a virion: a nucleic acid core wrapped in a protein coat, with no cytoplasm, no organelles, no metabolism and no growth.

2. Virions of one kind of virus are particles of the same size, shape and composition, and in that state they are chemically inert, so a purified suspension of them can be made to settle into an ordered, repeating array in the same way that a purified protein is crystallised.

3. W. M. Stanley obtained tobacco mosaic virus as needle-shaped crystals in 1935; the crystals could be bottled and stored like an ordinary chemical, and on redissolving they still infected tobacco plants.

4. Being obtainable and storable as a crystal is a behaviour that no cell or organism can show, so the abiotic property of a virus is that it can be crystallized.

Cross-check against the other statements

• "It does not have the genetic material" — every virus carries a genome, DNA in bacteriophage T4 and RNA in tobacco mosaic virus, so possessing genetic material is counted among the biotic characters of a virus and not among its abiotic ones.

• "It does not have protein" — the capsid that encloses the genome is built of protein subunits called capsomeres, and enveloped viruses carry additional glycoproteins in their outer membrane, so a virus is a nucleoprotein particle.

• "It cannot reproduce" — this is the closest distractor, and it falls short on two counts. First, as written it is untrue: inside a host cell a virus multiplies into thousands of progeny particles. Second, multiplication inside a host is itself listed among the biotic characters of a virus; what this statement really describes is dependence on a host, that is the parasitic habit of a virus, and not the non-living behaviour the question asks about.