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New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection
- mcherm 10y agoI think an alien looking at life on earth might find it very peculiar that so many of our life forms split into 2 independent parts that are unable to reproduce unless they match up with a partner of the opposite "sex". This is no stranger than that -- but it's fascinating to us who haven't encountered it before. The "sex" thing turns out to have big advantages: mostly that it allows for faster evolution by allowing mixing of genes between the two different genders so new advantageous traits can be spread through the population much faster than if each organism simply copied itself. I'll bet this scheme has advantages too -- the smaller size of the components (useful for getting through various membranes and other defenses) is an obvious one, there may be others that are less obvious.
- dexwiz 10y agoMight be strange that we have sexes. Might also be strange that we only have 2 sexes. Many plants have two different generational types (haploid and diploid). Meaning each "generation" alternates between two different organism types. Fungi have both sexual and assexual reproduction [2]. But their sexual reproduction occurs when two cells directly fuse and then undergo meiosis into haploid spores instead of a diploid organism. Haplodiploidy occurs in insects where males are haploid by females are diploid [3]. Sex can be much more complicated than what it is in humans. Alien species may have even more complicated systems for genetic recombination. [1] http://sciencelearn.org.nz/Contexts/Ferns/Sci-Media/Animations-and-Interactives/Fern-life-cycle http://sciencelearn.org.nz/Contexts/Ferns/Sci-Media/Animatio... [2] https://www.boundless.com/biology/textbooks/boundless-biology-textbook/fungi-24/characteristics-of-fungi-149/fungi-reproduction-591-11810/ https://www.boundless.com/biology/textbooks/boundless-biolog... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy
- seangrogg 10y ago> Sex can be much more complicated than what it is in humans. Completely arbitrary anecdotal evidence would suggest otherwise.
- logfromblammo 10y agoFungal sexual reproduction has more than two mating types, as well, which is apparently made possible by handling the mitochondria differently from animals. In animals, the two parent cells fuse and the male's mitochondria is destroyed. In fungi, the nuclear material is transferred between cells, and incompatible mitochondria never occupy the same cell. So a species could have one type or thousands of mating types, and may be homothallic or heterothallic. Meaning that individuals of the same type could be compatible, or not, respectively. In a dimorphic animal species, if you wander the wild and encounter a random member of your species, it is about 50% likely you could reproduce. For some species of fungus, a random encounter could be as high as 99.999% likely to be compatible. We don't even need to imagine aliens for this. We have species right here on Earth that are incredibly different from us, and also available to be studied.
- tathougies 10y ago> Many plants have two different generational types (haploid and diploid). For the vast majority of plants, these are not physically separate organisms. The key difference here is that the haploid cells of the plant can themselves undergo mitosis, which animal gametes cannot do. Since we generally consider cells with different genetics to be different individuals, we speak of plants as having alternation of generations. For the most part however, the haploid cells live in the diploid organism or vice versa, depending on which branch of the kingdom you're considering. It's not like botanists run tests on a particular specimen to determine its ploidy. For any given species, we know what the ploidy of the individual is. For example, flowering plants are all diploid. If you find a flowering plant, the individual has two sets of chromosomes, but somewhere in its tissues there is a haploid cell (descended from the parent) that is undergoing meiosis, and is thus a separate organism.
- zrth 10y agoTwo of my most favorite books tries to shine light on some of the different aspects of your (first) question. Maybe the unexpected findings during the pursuit of this question will be as fascinating to you as it was to me. The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped Human Nature (2000) (Geoffrey Miller) The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (Matt Ridley) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evolution_of_Human_Nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)#Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)...
- milesvp 10y agoI doubt it. I suspect that for sufficiently complex creatures, sex is the rule not the exception. The benefits from genetic crossover are so powerful from an evolutionary survival point of view, that it very much outweighs the cost of coordinating said crossover. With asexual reproduction, one small shift in climate, and your entire species risks extinction. There's just not enough genetic variation to deal with all the possible ways that local conditions can change on you. Crossover is so powerful from an algorithmic sense, that you don't even need spot mutations for a genetic algorithm to converge on a solution. And crossover algorithms will tend to converge on solutions much faster than algorithms using only point mutations. Basically from the books I've read on the topic of Artificial Life, there tends to be a very strong pull to species developing 2 sexes in simulations. Rarely are there more than 2 sexes though since the cost of coordinating more actors isn't offset by the marginal benefit of having more gene diversity. There was one ALife experiment I heard of that managed to converge on 5 partnered sex, though I'm not sure if that meant the species had 5 distinct sexes, or if you needed 5 genetic donors to guarantee reproduction. I'm not near my library, else I'd link some of the books on the topic that I really liked.
- malz 10y ago"The maintenance of sexual reproduction in a highly competitive world has long been one of the major mysteries of biology given that asexual reproduction can reproduce much more quickly." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sexual_reproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sexual_reproducti... [NSFW: animal porn]
- MollyR 10y agoWow that's crazy. It could explain why certain viruses affect people and not others. The afflicted could have latent viral compatible genes in their personal genomes. It'll be really interesting what this means for vaccines.
- jobu 10y agoSurprisingly, sci-news.com has a better writeup on this than NPR - http://www.sci-news.com/biology/guaico-culex-virus-multicomponent-animal-virus-04138.html http://www.sci-news.com/biology/guaico-culex-virus-multicomp... “Although multicomponent genomes are relatively common among RNA viruses that infect plants and fungi, this method of genome organization has not previously been seen in animal viruses.” Edit: Thinking about this more, I wonder if this might be some sort of virus crossover vector from plants to animals? Mosquitos are in a somewhat unique position ecologically - they require nectar from plants to survive, and they may bite several different animals to acquire blood for reproduction (spreading viruses along the way).
- mataug 10y ago> Surprisingly, sci-news.com has a better writeup on this than NPR Are sci-news's usual writeups bad ? Why is it surprising ? Other from sci-news seemed fine to me .
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- jobu 10y agoPoor choice of words maybe. Mostly I was surprised by the lower than expected quality of article on NPR. The title is clickbaity, and they definitely missed key bits of information.
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoIt's more that NPR's write-ups are usually quite good.
- spikels 10y agoSeems like whenever NPR reports on subjects I happen to know really really well I find myself disappointed. Makes me wonder about the rest of their reporting.
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- jotux 10y agoThis would make for an interesting scifi plot. A global virus spreads that has multiple parts and people must limit their contact with specific people or risk acquiring components that activate the parts of the virus they carry.
- cmurf 10y agohttp://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Vengeance_Factor_(episode) http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Vengeance_Factor_(epi...
- jcoffland 10y agoThat episode of STNG is about a virus which targets a specific DNA. > In sickbay, Crusher reveals to Riker that Volnoth was killed by a microvirus. The interesting part was that the microvirus was specifically designed for a certain strain of DNA in Acamarians, approximately one in a million. Riker notes that this is unnatural, which leads Crusher to presume that Volnoth was murdered.
- emilga 10y agoIn one of Greg Egan's short stories there is a religious maniac who engineers a deadly STD so as to permit only one lifetime sexual partner, lest the virus be activated and kill the fornicator. (If I remember the plot correctly. It's in the "Axiomatic" short story collection.)
- Severian 10y agoJust a thought: I wonder if the virus uses some form of redundancy encoding like certain RAID or file XOR systems use. I wonder if RNA/DNA has a checksum or data correction code somewhere? It would be really neat if this virus does something like that. It might be why the 5th viral component is not required.
- toufka 10y agoIt actually is likely the opposite. Many viruses deliberately avoid checksumming and error correcting, as that's how it generates better modular parts - through errors and variation. Some viruses like HPV actively shut down their host's error-correction equipment, so that they may be more effective (why HPV infections greatly increase chance of cancer). If you have a multi-part system where your factory is producing literally billions of variants of each, and you want better parts, one way to do that is to have each part be slightly different. Those that naturally work best together will go on to be more, well, virulent.
- Fomite 10y agoAlong with that, one of the reasons HIV is so hard to design a vaccine for is it's absurdly high error rate, which drives a huge amount of genetic diversity even within-host.
- Ralfp 10y ago> I wonder if RNA/DNA has a checksum or data correction code somewhere? You may consider CRISPR mechanism that Bacteria use to defend themselves against mutations introduced by the invading viruses as sort of data corerction. As for greater organisms, it seems that preferable approach is to have copies of single genes in case. Apparently some species are more resistant to cancer to other due to number of anti-cancerous genene they posses in their DNA. Phenomena is known as Peto's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox
- mlvljr 10y agoWas not HIV said to be like that?
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- ChuckMcM 10y agoOk, off tangent a bit, but if you randomly sample mosquitoes, those mosquitos have limited flight range, and you find things about the blood meals they have eaten. Are you at risk of invading the privacy of people who live near the mosquitoes?
- netcraft 10y agoLooks like the flight range can vary between 100s of feet and as much as 40 miles or more http://www.mosquito.org/faq#far http://www.mosquito.org/faq#far They would have to only take a blood meal from a single host and you'd have to be able to correlate the data - but maybe?
- etendue 10y agoVery interesting question. What if, by chance, you tested that blood and found it positive for HIV? What are your ethical obligations viz. notification as one example? (Mosquitos can't transmit HIV, but they can capture the virus while feeding)
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- Ericson2314 10y ago> Mosquitos can't transmit HIV Never thought of that. Thank goodness!
- gall 10y agoHairspray won't do it alone, but hairspray mixed with lipstick and perfume will be toxic, and untraceable.
- pmyjavec 10y agoPerfect
- bluejekyll 10y agoAll I can think about after reading that is how to create some set of logic gates for data transfer. What if different combinations of the parts of a virus could be formed into different actual viruses and produce a single new output variant. For Example, you could combine 00, 01, 11, 10 and then the two part virus would output the result of a NAND operation. We could have naturally occurring computations in nature. Each mosquito could be seen as a single "cpu" and it's output would be to infect another mosquito. Not sure how you'd collect all the results though, or how you'd not just have endless cycles... perhaps the life of each individual cell could be encoded in DNA/RNA where two virus parts can only come together if their DNA/RNA has the same "clock cycle" encoded (similar to lamport/vector clocks).
- jcoffland 10y agoHow would you order the operations?
- dmichulke 10y agoNot an expert but I suppose it's sufficient if you model the virus such that an eventual equilibrium is (or contains) your solution.
- jcoffland 10y agoThat's some serious hand waving.
- bluejekyll 10y agoThat's where encoding in in RNA would be important, think about just a monotomically incrementing clock tick from one virus generation to the next, two cells would only merge if they had the same clock. I basically know nothing about what's possible in RNA/DNA, but my understanding is that RNA can be used to adjust DNA, which could essentially increment a clock tick.
- Balgair 10y agoIf you are really interested in learning more about genetics and DNA, try reading this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21766/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21766/ The Central Dogma and all it's exceptions are fascinating stuff. It all acts like a computer in many ways, but since it has to balance on the edge of statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics and has a very angry set of Maxwell's Demons (say, a lambda virus) always coming in and messing it all up, DNA has evolved many very cool features.
- impostervt 10y agoHow is this not called the Voltron Virus?
- whitehat2k9 10y agoIt's like nature's equivalent to Ubisoft's episodic release schedule of Hitman.
- zellyn 10y agoReminds me of this… https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/01/25/1343218/directvs-secret-war-on-hackers https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/01/25/1343218/directv...
- otto_ortega 10y agoWhy if instead of spending money researching the diseases that mosquitos could transmit to humans on the future we spend all that money into figuring out a way to exterminate all mosquitos from the surface of earth once and for all? As someone who lives on a tropical country and had have both Dengue and Chikungunya I can attest mosquitos are pure evil, and there are several researchs suggesting they serve no purpose on keeping the enviromental equilibrium (if they are gone, they won't be missed, the enviroment will be fine...) On a side note, reading "U.S. Army Medical Research" , "Infectious Diseases", "new virus" and "mosquitos" in the same article makes no good to my paranoia...
- DicksenZuider 10y agoExterminating all mosquitoes could doom the animals that eat them. Birds, insects, spiders, salamanders, lizards and frogs could lose their primary food source. Wiping out a large part of the ecology could be a disaster.
- johnmaguire2013 10y agoThe parent specifically noted: > [...] and there are several researchs suggesting they serve no purpose on keeping the enviromental equilibrium (if they are gone, they won't be missed, the enviroment will be fine...) I'd love to see a source on this. The best I can find is this, which does indicate that some species could go extinct as a result: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html
- Symmetry 10y agoWhat I've read on the topic is that animals that eat mosquitos have lots of small flying insects to choose from if they disappear, so much so that you'd never notice the difference. Their role as pollinators is a bit more fraught but again there are still a few replacements standing by in pretty much every case.
- lowpro 10y agoAlthough he's missing references to the studies he mentioned, the point was animals that eat mosquitos would be fine without them, as they also eat other insects. Spiders come to mind.
- kusmi 10y agoHaving the genome separated between multiple coinfecting particles is actually quite common among plant viruses.
- joshpadnick 10y agoShamir's Secret Sharing [1] for viruses. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
- kens 10y agoHow is this different from the hepatitis D virus? Hepatitis D isn't complete, and can only propagate if there is a hepatitis B infection. In other words, you can only get hepatitis D if you already have the hepatitis B virus, and then it makes things worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_D
- zbjornson 10y agoHepatitis delta is a satellite virus, of which there are many. The virus described in this article doesn't seem to be considered a satellite virus because, presumably because no part of it is replication-competent. It's a single virus that has its genome segments packaged separately.
- orf 10y agoNature is fucking crazy.
- xfactor973 10y agoWith our powers combined...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 10y agoIt's funny how us humans tend to figure out laws and rules and forget that they are derived, not dictated and that nature will do it's own thing regardless of what we've so far figure out. The virus is not breaking any rules, we messed up in figuring out what the rules were in the first place.
- pai_dpiper 10y agoThis is like the Power Rangers of viruses - red, green, blue, pink, yellow UNITE!!!
- slowmovintarget 10y agoI prefer to think of it as Voltron... but potato potahto.
- pai_dpiper 10y agoThis is like the Power Rangers of viruses - red, green, blue, pink, yellow UNITE!!!
- wimagguc 10y agoIn rather abstract evolution mechanics, this isn't much different from requiring male and female counterparts to procreate. All that happens here is that smaller entities are a better fit for the environment, while only a combination of them stores the full information required for another entity to be created. In simulations this has been seen quite often.
- yarg 10y agoThis is very cool, It rather effectively simulates sexual reproduction in a virus. Furthermore, the host could develop an immune response to one strain of a module, catch another strain and the other dormant modules once again become active. One scary facet of the way that this works, if there exist module combinations that prove lethal to the hosts, there is a significantly reduced likelihood that the infection will burn itself out - the lethal version can exist spread out across the population randomly combining to strike down some poor innocent mosquito. Disclaimer: I'm not a virologist, and there's a good chance I'm full of shit.
- ggchappell 10y agoInstead of thinking of this as a virus in pieces, might it be better to think of it as a symbiosis (with the "bio" part being deemphasized a bit)?
- AceJohnny2 10y agoThis reminds me of the story between a cable-box developer and crackers. I'll need to find the exact story, but it goes something like this: The developer would send an over-the-air update, the crackers would crack it within days and provide that to their userbase. Usually the crackers would just nop out the few instructions that branched into DRM code or something. At some point, the crackers noticed that the OTAs seemed to include "dead" code, that wasn't being called by anything. Just in case it was used by the live code, they left it in. It didn't prevent their cracks. Then, a little bit down the line, an OTA update made use of all those pieces of dead code to simultaneously harden legitimate boxes against cracking, and brick hacked boxes. The developer had, in effect, distributed his countermeasures piecemeal in order to pass the crackers guards and be included in the cracked network, and in one delayed action assembled and activated the countermeasure. Edit: Ah, here was the story from 2001 about the "Black Sunday Kill", and it was DirectTV: https://slashdot.org/story/01/01/25/1343218/directvs-secret-war-on-hackers https://slashdot.org/story/01/01/25/1343218/directvs-secret-... And it looks like this was the guy who did it: http://www.wired.com/2008/05/tarnovsky/?currentPage=all http://www.wired.com/2008/05/tarnovsky/?currentPage=all I got a bunch of the details wrong (hey, it's been 15 years!) but that's the gist of it. The Slashdot story has the meat of it!
- AceJohnny2 10y agoOfftopic: man, those were the good days of Slashdot, two tech news+comments sites ago for me. I then gradually switched to Reddit, and now HN. I wonder what will be next.
- DigitalJack 10y agoThat's a very interesting line of thought. I had a slightly different thought, along the lines of forward error correction and splitting up the coded message to make sure the loss of one or two pieces is tolerable.
- AceJohnny2 10y agoYou mean something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing or even RAID6's Reed-Solomon codes?
- diyseguy 10y agoWhat's in it for the virus? Why 5 pieces? What's the evolutionary advantage? Does the virus have 5 sexes? Weird.
- known 10y agoA team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases has found a mosquito virus that's broken up into pieces. And the mosquito needs to catch several of the pieces to get an infection.