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Scientists have discovered the first virovore – an organism that eats viruses
- nigamanth 4y agoWouldn't we also eat viruses without knowing all the time? That'd make us all virovores too.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoWe don't consume in a targeted fashion, we also don't have special mechanisms to get energy out of them.
- thebeardisred 4y agothat have been identified.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoIf you would compute the mass of a typical infection dose or even a full-blown infection and calculated the maximum caloric content in all the chemical bonds, I'm pretty sure it would amount to not much more than a grain of rice or similar. It is conceivable and probable that some parts of viruses get broken down to keto bodies usable in the krebs cycle. The amino acids in the capsule for sure. Parts of the lipids of a viral membrane (which some virus have) maybe. But those aren't special mechanism and are used more as an accident to the destruction of viral particles rather than an intentional harvesting of energy. The energy expended to destroy the particles in the first part is also probably greater.
- not_enoch_wise 4y agoEat at Jack In The Box, and you’re doing your part to support human virovore research
- wwarner 4y agoLove this mindset — “Given the sheer abundance of viruses and microorganisms in the water, he figured it was inevitable that — even setting aside infection — the former would sometimes wind up inside the latter.”
- rmk 4y agoCan someone ELI5 no one ever thought to look for this in the first place? Viruses cause so many illnesses, would it be possible to release (possibly benign) bacteria that eat the illness causing virus into the body (assuming the bacteria themselves aren't attacked by the immune system)? Also, is this an accidental discovery? Having read the article, I am under the impression that it is a bit of a chance find.
- fillskills 4y agoVery silly beginner question: Arent viruses non-alive? Arent virsus just DNA strands that if they fall into the right place in a cell mechanism, the cell mechanism will replicate them by mistake.
- weatherlight 4y agoThere's an ongoing debate, that when the cell is taken over by the virus, at that point the virus is kind of alive. the infected cell is the viruses' living form. 1) The infected cell, is no longer the same as the organism's other cells. If it's a single celled organism, the infected cell no longer the original organism. 2) Once the "infected cell" starts shedding the virus, that's when the virus is alive so to speak. the actual virus microbe thats shedded can be thought as a sex cell of sorts. (Like pollen or mammalian sperm or eggs, etc.) Disclaimer. I'm not a virologist and as far as I know, *most* virologist conclude (last time i checked) that viruses are non-living microbes
- bayesian_horse 4y agoThey are sometimes DNA and sometimes RNA. They also usually have proteins and lipids surrounding the genetic material, providing some protection and also the means of entering a cell. When replicating, both the genetic material and those proteins have to be replicated.
- twic 4y agoIt depends how you define "alive". Which is not really an interesting scientific question; biologists understand (roughly!) what viruses are and how they work, and defining them as alive or not doesn't contribute anything to that understanding, it just puts a label on it.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoA virus is basically not a full cell. It doesn't do much until it enters a cell where it essentially feeds information to make the cell start doing things. Like creating more of the virus. It can't do that by itself. It relies on the host cell to do all the processing. If you think of the cell as a computer and the virus of some kind of information carrier (tape, cdrom, etc.), you can answer the question by asking yourself whether a cd-rom is capable of doing computation. Which would be a good analogy for being alive. To which of course the answer is no. So, by that analogy, viruses are not alive. They don't act by themselves. In the same way DNA is not alive. It's just a passive protein.
- funnyfoobar 4y agoThis seems pretty cool! I wonder if we can extend this experiment for other viruses like HIV, Covid etc to see if this Halteria can consume it. That would be ground breaking.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoIt would not. Certainly you can't use that organism inside a Human body. Your immune system would object - violently. Another problem about HIV is that there are so few Virus particles "floating around" at any time, which (among other things) makes it challenging to fight with vaccines or pharmaceutics. And all Viruses are hard to get to when they are inside a cell, which is why the immune system mainly uses cell targeting mechanisms to get rid of viral infections, rather than the "humoral" defense of free floating antibodies (simplifying by a lot here).
- funnyfoobar 4y agothat makes a lot of sense. but how does good bacteria work, that is present on intenstine? Why immune system does not try to kill it?
- EchoReflection 4y agoThere's always a smaller fish.
- Satsana 4y agoUhm.. I'm no scientist but from that perspective, aren't phagocytes also virovores ?..
- mcculley 4y agoThis reminds me of a question I have asked of those with more biology knowledge and not gotten a satisfying answer: Would there be adverse outcomes if we somehow killed all viruses?
- pchristensen 4y agoI don't have the science background to tell you which adverse outcomes, but you can be assured that the answer is yes.
- mcculley 4y agoCan you elaborate on that? Or is it a gut feeling?
- maxbond 4y agoAlso unqualified but presumably similar to if you remove predators from an ecosystem; without negative feedback, fast replicating organisms get out of hand, biodiversity drops, eventually the ecosystem either crashes or evolves new feedback loops. Consider that, if you pick a type of organism or of a hat - it is probably a virus (eg, for each kind of cellular organism, there are many kinds of virus targeting that organism). Getting rid of all the viruses would cut biodiversity by more than half, just on it's own. That's pulling a lot of rivets out of your airplane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service#Ecology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service#Ecology see redundancy hypothesis). Heres an article about depriving an ecosystem of predators: https://nautil.us/the-ecologist-who-threw-starfish-235831/ https://nautil.us/the-ecologist-who-threw-starfish-235831/
- jll29 4y agoI enjoyed reading this article, which gives a glimpse of the life of "wet science" researchers and the two phases - in vitro vs. in vivo (cf. the last sentence). The fact that a virus can be nutrition is an effect of it being part of the physical world: "it's made of stuff". Computer viruses, in contrast, are pure information, hence their ingredients cannot be eaten. Viruses are interesting because they are not alive, yet they replicate, which is at least one property of life forms; they are physically encoded information in a crystal hull. The peer review process, which is being debated here, is a bit like UNIX: some of it sucks but half a century later we still haven't come up with anything better or nearly as good. Peer review is important, and I'm concerned about the floods of pre-prints that are often cited as if they were (already) scientific publications - many will never be. What would help to take out sloppiness, nastiness and generally poor quality in peer reviews is if journals also always had meta-reviewers (reviewers that review the reviews) like the computer science conference do that I publish in. One might say that is the role of the editor, but I see the editor more as a Program Committee Chair, higher-level role. A paper rejected by all reviewers unisono would be rejected, a paper accepted by most reviewers would be rejected and papers with controversial reviews could go up to the editor after potential adding another reviewer first, who could be tasked to address specifically disagreements. Reviewing should be part of postgraduate education (I teach my doctoral candidates how to do it), but almost nowhere is, so there are many sub-par reviews by people who are not mentored properly. Overzealous reviews often come from younger postdocs or first-year PhD students, whereas older faculty members tend to be more generous, IMHO.
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- weatherlight 4y agoI just learned about virophages a few days ago. Viruses and their relationship to other organisms or viruses is bizarre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virophage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virophage I wonder if virovores could be exploited for medical purposes?
- bayesian_horse 4y agoProbably not. Much easier to use antibodies produced in some way.
- maxbond 4y agoSeems like it'd be super useful for maintaining a virus-free environment in an ongoing manner in a circumstance where they would contaminate your results, but where the virovores wouldn't. Maybe there's a virus that you're able to account for in your methodology that you feed the virovores with, and they stick around and clean up other viruses that get into your culture. Or maybe in an industrial process they could help dampen the spread of viral outbreaks in your bioreactor.
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoCo-culture might be fine. But realistically it's probably a lot easier to add neutralizing antibodies or other peptides or chemicals which would block viral infection. For an industrial process it would likely be easier to just genetically modify your organism to be resistant to the virus.
- maxbond 4y agoA nice benefit of the virovore though would be it would evolve to counter evolution of the virii. You could still treat with peptides &c but eventually they'll stop being effective. Against a highly adaptive organism it's probably best to employ multiple overlapping treatments. I'm not 100% sure it's this particular talk [1], but this researcher has a fascinating talk on this channel about using phage therapy in tandem with antibiotics such that bacteria resistant to the antibiotic are susceptible to the phage. Iirc they were able to clear up a life threatening antibiotic resistant infection in a patient's aorta with a single treatment. Genetic modification can be tricky in long-lived cultures, the organism you're cultivating may discard your modifications. There's things you can do to make this more difficult, but I can imagine a really general solution that works for many cultures could be super useful (say, for cultures you're speculating about productizing, but don't want to make too much of an investment in until you've characterized them better). I ran some wild west style, open air algae bioreactors for a while, and I'd fantasize about productizing organisms like this for pest control. Crazy things can happen in that sort of environment; I wasn't around at the time but there was a story about a storm which blew in from the against prevailing winds, carrying some weird kind of rotifer not normally native to that environment, and across the state people woke up to their ponds turning pink. In that kind of environment you're unable to anticipate which organisms will invade your ponds. I think it's possible those kinds of cheap, low-control methods of production will become very important. [1] https://youtu.be/xvC8xME5Zrg https://youtu.be/xvC8xME5Zrg
- ethbr0 4y agoWould be fascinated to hear how the hell they do this microbiologically. This study just seemed to strongly indicate they do it. I mean, as the consumER you'd have to (a) be resistant to getting infected by the virus in the first place, (b) encapsulate the virus in a way it can't broach, (c) deactivate and decompose it into nutrients you can use, no? Which seems a tall order for something designed and continually evolving to breach your cell walls! Granted, Halteria ciliates don't appear to be the virus' primary target, so potentially lack necessary binding points / are impenetrable to them, but that seems like playing with fire. Or eating plankton if plankton were carnivorous and rapidly evolving... Although maybe it makes evolutionary sense if the Halteria:algae ratio is extremely low? I.e. it was never beneficial to target Halteria when more numerous food sources were colocated.
- twic 4y ago> deactivate and decompose it into nutrients you can use Viruses are just packages of protein, lipids, and nucleic acid, exactly like any other biological matter. It's not particularly surprising that enzymes which can digest bacteria (Halteria's usual food) can also digest viruses.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI think from the article the viruses don’t target the ciliates at all but rather algae. That explains (a). I expect b and c are answerable with gradients and membrane mumbojumbo, but a programmer not a microbiologist. I actually like the study author am surprised that this hasn’t been observed before. I would have expected viruses are food for something - as it notes they’re little bundles of tasty proteins and useful elements.
- echelon 4y ago> lack necessary binding points Viruses need far more than binding points to make use of a cell. They need to handle attachment, penetration, uncoating, gene expression, replication, assembly, and release. Some of these may leverage host machinery, or sometimes the virus packs their own. If they use the host, they typically need to have greater flux kinetics than the host. If they're able to do this, there's a chance they resemble a virus that the host already knows how to deal with. In that case, they'll also need to outmaneuver any existing intracellular defenses. That's a lot of evolution that has to happen to fit your target.
- gz5 4y agoFascinating. It seems sensible (to a layman) that something would eat viruses but how would we construct tests (not trolling) to determine: 1. if the Halteria were not eating something_else, and that something_else was infected by the viruses? 2. if the Halteria themselves were not infected by the viruses? 3. are the Halteria trying to ingest the viruses, or are they just ingesting lots_of_things in the petri dish? This observation seems interesting, assuming all other variables were constant and there was not some other interplay between the chlorovirus and other microbes which indirectly helped the Halteria grow: >Halteria deprived of the chlorovirus, meanwhile, wasn’t growing at all. Finally if the Halteria can ingest it and yet not be 'infected' by it then that seems awfully interesting as well.
- nomel 4y agoMacrophages, like the ones that liv in your mouth, also eat virus: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/macrophage https://askabiologist.asu.edu/macrophage
- d1sxeyes 4y agoI think the use of the word 'eat' is a bit non-specific. Macrophages cannot survive on a diet of virus. They can absolutely 'eat' it in the sense of taking it from outside the cell, breaking it down into constituent components inside the cell, and then putting it back outside the cell as waste, but they can't use viruses as a food source.
- BizarroLand 4y agoI would also wonder if Halteria could be genetically modified to consume PFAs and microplastics in the human body, assuming that our own immune system didn't attack and eliminate them on sight faster than we could replenish them.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoThose viruses infect algae. Halteria aren't algae. Also they multiplied in presence of that virus. So no, they aren't getting infected.
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- fnordpiglet 4y agoI, for one, welcome our new vivore overlords.
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- shadowgovt 4y agoVirovoverlords?
- novia 4y agoPretty sure we eat viruses all the time. Good to experimentally demonstrate that they are able to provide a benefit though.
- divbzero 4y agoYes, I suppose the more interesting finding is the ability to grow on a virus-only diet.
- theandrewbailey 4y agoIndeed. Only a small handful of viruses infect humans. An XKCD What-If was particularly enlightening for me: https://what-if.xkcd.com/80/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/80/
- jjtheblunt 4y ago"virovore"... latin years in school flashback, but that word is malformed, because virus is Latin 4th declension and there's no -o stem in any case. seems "viruvore" would be more appropriate, and matches the forming of actual latin present active participle (think -ing in english) "virulens" (virulent). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_fourth_declension https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_fourth_declens... Assuming "virus" is 2nd declension leads to a contradiction, in there is an -o stem in a case, but that assumption contradicts the centuries old "virulent" which wasn't written "virolent". And the reason i mention all this is that i have no idea how one finds modern etymologies for classical words without knowing the languages (or subsets of course) outright.
- mjochim 4y agoIt is not uncommon for a language to borrow two words from one source language in different centuries. The two borrowings can then follow different mechanisms, perhaps because something about the target language has changed in the meantime. Or maybe because knowledge of the source language was widespread in the target language community when one word was borrowed but not when the other one was borrowed.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoi'm trying to think of an example. do you have an example? i can come up with a composite word whose two parts are non obvious and obvious, but they're not loan words : were+wolf, with were germanic cousin to Latin vir and wolf obvious.
- gdprrrr 4y ago> Many words of French origin were borrowed twice or more. There were at least three periods of borrowing: one that occurred shortly after the Norman Conquest and came from Norman French, one in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from standard (Parisian) French at the time when English nobles were switching from French to English, and a third one during the sixteenth to nineteenth century, when France was at the height of its power and international influence. Examples of doublets from the first and second periods are catch vs. chase, cattle vs. chattel, and warden vs. guardian. More recent borrowings are often distinguished by maintaining the French spelling and pronunciation, e.g. chef (vs. chief), pâté (vs. paste), fête (vs. feast). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublet_(linguistics)#Norman_vs._standard_or_Modern_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublet_(linguistics)#Norman_v...
- water8 4y agoIsnt that what a T-cell does?
- antegamisou 4y agoIDK why some smartasses, who probably have not taken Biology in HS, decided to bury your comment but some subtypes of T cells are indeed able to attack virus-infected cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_cell
- water8 4y ago[dead]
- culi 4y agoI think "attacking" and "relying on for nutrition" isn't the hardest distinction to make. You wouldn't call a Ukrainian tank a "Russovore", would you?
- bayesian_horse 4y agoThey "attack" them usually in the form of passing a message like "please destroy yourself".
- thedailymail 4y agoI've been wondering recently, and probably naively, about a related question: does the human immune system have any kind of metabolic (digetsive) function? My understanding carries to the various ways that immune cells destroy non-self cells through processes like phagocytosis and lysis, and to the mechanisms for excreting waste products via, e.g., lymph. It seems like there would be opportunities to recycle components from bacterial or other cells, similar to how Halteria appear to be "eating" viruses. But I haven't found any references to this in a cursory search of pubmed (maybe because I just don't know the right keywords). So my question for HN: do immune cells "digest" their prey?
- classichasclass 4y ago
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