Viruses
Surrounded by Viruses
05/09/13 16:32 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Simon Anthony and his colleagues at Columbia University identified 58 viruses by genetic analyses in specimens sampled from the Indian Flying Fox, Pteropus giganteus, and based on this they extrapolated that there are at least 320,000 viruses waiting to be uncovered in other mammals. S. Pelech provides his own calculations for the number of mammalian viruses based also on the latest human virus data and comes up with a similar number. Read More...
Giant Viruses Are Ancient Living Organisms
14/09/12 13:17 Filed in: Laboratory Equipment
Gustavo Caetano-Anollés at the Univ. of Illinois Crop Sciences and Institute for Genomic Biology and his colleagues completed a study of giant viruses that supports the idea that viruses are ancient living organisms that may have arisen from a fourth branch of life, alongside bacteria, archaea and eukarya. The researchers conducted a census of all the protein folds occurring in more than 1,000 organisms representing bacteria, viruses, the microbes known as archaea and all other living things, and found that the genomes of some giant viruses exceeded the genetic endowments of the simplest bacteria. S. Pelech envisions that giant viruses evolved from invasive bacteria that eventually become mobile parasites that utilized the proteins encoded by their hosts to facilitate their own replication. Consequently, it is not necessary to invoke the existence of a fourth branch of life that predated or co-existed with the three known superkingdoms to explain their ubiquitous presence. Read More...