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Scientists discover virus with no recognizable genes
- sci_prog 7y agoViruses might as well be alien nanobots created to spread and "engineer" life around the universe.
- eitland 7y agoI am not a biologist, and that sounds weird to me: Aren't viruses dependent on hosts?
- NotAnEconomist 7y agoThe RNA-world hypothesis conjectures that life started via a chemical soup developing things similar to viroids. 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.
- Vinceo 7y agoWow, this blows my mind. So is there a hypothesis that viroids may have been planted on comets by aliens to seed life around the cosmos and that we may be a product of that? If so, do you know the name of that hypothesis? I guess there's not much to base such a wild hypothesis on but would love to go down the rabit hole anyways.
- pixl97 7y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
- Vinceo 7y agoThanks
- 14 7y agoI can't find the article but I once read a fascinating theory that life is simply the evolution of entropy. The universe constantly trying to equalize, take higher energies and equalize them. Like a rock on a ledge there is energy waiting to release. Once all the energy is release the universe will end. The theory argued that life is simply the universe finding the most maximum way it can convert energy from one form to the other. I can't find the article at the moment but will continue looking. If correct it argues that life would be fundamental throughout the entire universe. Edit: Found it, it talks about thermodynamics and entropy being the inevitable outcome. https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-theory-of-life-20170726/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-t...
- 0xTJ 7y agoIt's a fun sci-fi idea, but it's completely detached from reality.
- headelf 7y agoCan you expand on why?
- thaumasiotes 7y agoSpecifically, it is the idea behind Speaker for the Dead and a theme of the following books.
- viscanti 7y agoGreat point. There's enough research there to show it's not just a fun sci-fi idea. It's not something that should be dismissed so easily.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoTechnically it is a hypothesis which does not yet have a good experimental design that might prove or falsify it. And in that aspect it isn't "canon" so it isn't "reality." But it is far from being a preposterous idea, and there are labs that are working on various ideas on how one might prove or disprove it.
- meowface 7y agoIt's also possible it's attached to other parts of reality. Maybe this is thing that happens with great frequency in other parts of the universe/multiverse, even if it may not be what happened here.
- sinuhe69 7y agoTo me, viruses are simply the survival horde of random mutation and recombination of amino acids. Let it be long enough and a world of organic compounds would create something like viruses.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 7y agoI know "no recognizable genes" is in the title, but it's misleading. They're recognizable as genes, but never seen before: > 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.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoThese viruses seem to be as ancient as cellular life, and may preserve genes that did not become incorporated into the last common ancestor of living beings. That, or new protein families evolve even today.
- mirimir 7y agoI don't get that from TFA. > 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.
- keanzu 7y agoI was mislead by the title. "unknown genes" would have clued me in but I interpreted "no recognizable genes" completely differently.
- mirimir 7y agoRight. I was expecting something like prions.
- XFrequentist 7y agoAs was I, terrible title.
- 7y ago
- fpgaminer 7y agoTIL discovering viral novelty is common: > 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%.
- amphitoky 7y agothat's not just true for viruses, it's true for pretty much anything. we've barely scraped the surface in terms of sequencing microbes, fungi, plants, birds, fish, ..., not to even consider variation at the population (or god forbid, somatic cell) level.
- mirimir 7y agoBack in the day, you only knew about microorganisms and viruses that you knew how to grow. And that apparently excludes about 99.9% of stuff. 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 :)
- throwaway2048 7y agoAnd we are driving huge percentages to extinction before they are even recognized.
- pm90 7y agoAs a species we've barely scraped the surface of understanding this earth. Consider: we haven't even scratched the crust of the planet. Not to mention the infinite space beyond. 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.
- carapace 7y agoI recommend "A Planet of Viruses" by Carl Zimmer. It's really short but almost every page is a mind-blower. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10840041-a-planet-of-viruses 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/Grey_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage 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?)
- mirimir 7y ago> I don't know why you don't explode into viruses ten seconds after you enter the ocean ... Basically, none of our ancestors did. Or vice versa, mutatis mutandis, and so on.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoIf you're just slinging random Latin phrases around, you really missed your opportunity to end with et cetera.
- mirimir 7y agoHa. 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.
- pm90 7y ago> (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?) 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.
- danieltillett 7y agoWhen I was an academic working in the bacterial virus (phage) field my lab used to find these viruses with no similarity to anything in the databases all the time. We would find virus after virus that had a totally unique genome. The only way we could identify the genes that encoded the structural proteins was to extract the virus proteins from purified viruses and get them mass speced. 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. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_phage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_phage
- rolleiflex 7y agoThe more I think about this, the more distressing this gets. I'd love to hear a little more about this. 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?
- ImaCake 7y ago>Does this mean lambda phage form is some sort of biology's equivalent (or as close as it gets) of a universal constant 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_X_174 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_mosaic_virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_mosaic_virus 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimivirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimivirus 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza
- danieltillett 7y ago
- effingwewt 7y agoWhen I was a child I read a book of short stories, I think it may have been Ray Bradbury. Anyway a cosmonaut leaves earth at near-light speeds and returns what are a few months to him, I dont remember how many years had passed on earth. The world was covered in green goo and the only people left were Americans and Russians living in submarines and still trying to kill each other with biological warfare. I believe anyway, this was about 25 years ago. It made me very afraid of all arms races. Does anyone happen to know the name of the author/book/story?