Viruses are one of the tiniest lifeforms and most mysterious organisms on the planet. They can’t even survive and reproduce without a host, so labeling them as living things is a conundrum. If that isn’t strange enough, Jônatas Abrahão, a virologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, and colleagues have discovered a virus with no recognizable genes. It is now the most bizarre of all known viruses.
Discovering new viruses is not uncommon, however. A different group of scientists has recently found thousands of new viruses hiding in the tissues of several animals. This continual unearthing has also exposed how little is yet known about these microscopic organisms that need to be understood.
When Abrahão stumbled upon the virus that has no recognizable genes, he had been hunting down giant viruses – microbes the size of bacteria. The giant viruses were first discovered in a lake in 2003 in amoebae. At the same time, the researchers found small viruses that were different from most that infect amoebae.
They named them Yaravirus because ‘Yara’ means the “mother of waters.” The team sequenced the Yaravirus’ genome and found it contained not a single gene that matches any ever seen before. Abrahão and his colleagues are currently investigating other aspects of the Yaravirus’ lifestyle.
As peculiar as this story is, viral novelty isn’t all that surprising. Elodie Ghedin of New York University, who looks for viruses in wastewater and respiratory systems, said:
More than 95% of the viruses in sewage data have “no matches to reference genomes [in databases]. We seem to be discovering new viruses all the time.
Meanwhile, as they were tracking down viruses one at a time, a pair of other virologists at the National Cancer Institute, Christopher Buck and graduate student Michael Tisza, were casting a much wider net by searching broadly in animal tissues. They were looking for viruses – called circular viruses – that retain their genetic material in a circle. Such viruses include papillomaviruses, like human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer.
Buck and Tisza found circular viruses in animals (including humans) by isolating viral particles from dozens of tissue samples. They screened for circular genomes and were able to confirm that the DNA belonged to viruses by looking for a specific gene – one that codes for a virus’ shell. Tisza wrote a computer program that could anticipate which genes were most likely to code for the distinctive folds of these shells. Their method revealed about 2500 circular viruses, about a quarter of which are new to science.
All these different teams of researchers still don’t know if these newly found microbes have any impact on human health. Nevertheless, the data should provide scientists and doctors with a base to start making connections.
Abrahão said:
The approach is an important tool to learn the distribution of hundreds or thousands of viral genomes.
Plus, not all viruses are harmful or cause disease. Some help us stay healthy, and others keep our ecosystems running smoothly by recycling essential nutrients. The characterization and discovery of viruses are of great benefit to humanity. In the end, we can’t survive without them!
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