Scientists discover virus with no recognizable genes
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
The really amazing thing is if you looked at these viruses under an electron microscope they looked exactly like known viruses (most looked like a lambda phage [1]). There seems to almost an infinite number of ways of making viruses that look just like lambda.
Does this mean lambda phage form is some sort of biology's equivalent (or as close as it gets) of a universal constant, or rather — was the genes that encode the 'container' (apologies for my lack of correct terminology here) the same, and the viral payload different, or is it also the case that the 'container code' is also unique between these viruses?
Maybe this is somewhat true for bacterial viruses, but it's worth noting it's not universally true for phages. eg see [0]. And I can't think of any mammalian viruses that are lambda phage style lunar landers. Sometimes, virses are cyclinders [1] or some kind of roughly spherical geometric structure [2], although some are just kinda blob shaped [3] enveloped viruses (some viruses have an envelope-capsid-envelope structure).
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_X_174 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_mosaic_virus 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimivirus 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza
One thing is certain and that is that we have barely scratched the surface of genetic diversity on this planet.
> Viral novelty doesn’t surprise Elodie Ghedin of New York University, who looks for viruses in wastewater and in respiratory systems. More than 95% of the viruses in sewage data have “no matches to reference genomes [in databases],” she says. Like Abrahão, she says, “We seem to be discovering new viruses all the time.”
You don't know what you don't know, I guess. That also means there is an invaluable wealth of genetic knowledge out there that we haven't recorded yet. I can't wait to see what insights are revealed once we've catalogued that missing 95%.
In Biology 101, I recall that we cloned bacteria from sewage, and then cloned a bacteriophage. But the instructors were very careful that we cloned E. coli :)
This is sorta why it makes me even more mad that our species is more concerned about silly political arguments rather than investing large fractions of our GDP into Science, educating more scientists and unleashing them on the mysteries that the world has to offer.
Instead the greatest minds of our generation are now focused on selling ads. It feels so pointless.
And money gives you power. The greatest minds are focused on making money for themselves and someone else.
Ads make money unfortunately. Knowledge about our planet earth does not.
Science costs money and resources. Politics enables money creation and resource extraction. The capacity of our current society to do science is greater than in any society in history. That’s no accident. It’s the direct result of the environment created by our political decisions.
The Soviet Union is a great counter example. For a short time, it was at the forefront of science, thanks to the state directing resources to science. It was only due to the untimely death of the head of its space program, for example, that the Soviet Union didn’t beat the United States to the moon. But did the Soviet Union cure AIDS? Create the Internet? Create smartphones? No. It’s politics weren’t sustainable, and it collapsed, and in the long run, its capacity to do science turned out to be quite limited.
So maybe our “silly political arguments” serve a function after all?
What I disagree on is that the silly political arguments have anything to do with that political stability. Arguments about abortion, tax cuts and gun laws seem to be the thing that animates most Americans which I would argue aren’t really things that make the country stable; on the contrary they actively harm the populace (if the conservative position on these issues is to be taken). Again the scientific consensus tells us what is the right choice (increase access to improve women’s health, increase taxes to reduce inequality and decrease availability of firearms to reduce gun violence).
What I’m sad is that the issues that animate most Americans aren’t that of eg discovering the vastness of space or combating climate change (perhaps this is changing?).
Don't forget the ones playing zero sum games, like high frequency trying.
Seems like a fun field to go into if you want something named after yourself (and your family, and your friends, and your pet)
To be catalogued, whatever it is has to be noticed first. The world is much too big for that to happen to most things.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10840041-a-planet-of-vir...
There are viruses that go into the hosts DNA, replicate along with it over generations, then wake up and start being viruses again!
The oceans are Grey Goo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage
> Marine viruses, although microscopic and essentially unnoticed by scientists until recently, are the most abundant and diverse biological entities in the ocean. Viruses have an estimated abundance of 10^30 in the ocean.
Marine bacteriophages kill about 40% of all bacteria in the ocean every day.
(I don't know why you don't explode into viruses ten seconds after you enter the ocean, there must be a way that the maelstrom of evolution doesn't create monsters, eh? Or maybe we are playing Russian Roulette every time we go in the water?)
Basically, none of our ancestors did. Or vice versa, mutatis mutandis, and so on.
There was actually an obscure point. That is, the people who turned into viruses didn't become ancestors.
It's also an even more obscure reference to a Burroughs' schtick, which I won't repeat here.
If humans start living in contact with the oceans for long enough we might! Viruses may seem magical but as with life, its statistics over the long run. There might be viruses with mutations that cause them to annihilate humans; but those mutants may just never have had the chance to come in contact with us and thus die off, or at least don't multiply.
> When the team sequenced its genome, none of its genes matched any scientists had come across before, the group reports on the bioRxiv preprint server.
> Some of Yaravirus’s genes look like those in a giant virus, but it’s still unclear how the two are related, Abrahão says. He and his colleagues are still investigating other aspects of the novel virus’s lifestyle.
I don't know enough about this stuff to comment coherently. Last I knew, it wasn't clear whether viruses were remnants of prebiotic stuff, or derived from cellular organisms, or some of each.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.28.923185v1....
Aren't viruses dependent on hosts?
These early RNA-based replicators would go on to become more complicated, first developing a protective barrier and then specialized organelles.
As a byproduct of that process, viruses developed which could interact with organelles (or just the soup inside a cell) to reproduce themselves without being part of the host "genetic code".
In approximate complexity order:
- self-replicating compound, in solution with precursors
- viroid
- virus
- bacteria
- archaea
- eukaryota
From that perspective, hiding viroids (or similar simple replicators) in comets and boosting them into other systems would be a relatively efficient way to "seed" life around the cosmos.
I guess there's not much to base such a wild hypothesis on but would love to go down the rabit hole anyways.
Edit: Found it, it talks about thermodynamics and entropy being the inevitable outcome. https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-t...