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Is the World's Largest Virus a Genetic Time Capsule?
gbrumfiel writes "Researchers in France have discovered the world's largest virus and given it a terrifying name: Pandoravirus. NPR reports it doesn't pose a threat to people, but its genetic code could hint at an unusual origin. The team believes that the virus may carry the genes from a long-dead branch of the tree of life, one that possibly even started on Mars or somewhere else. Other scientists are skeptical, but everyone agrees that the new giant virus is pretty cool."
This kind of questioning showed up when the Mimivirus, the first (?) giant amoeba virus appeared, including the bit about degenerating into a virus as a survival strategy. It turned out that all of its genes came directly from the amoebae it was infecting; it's basically just really bad at reproducing. While it would be really neat to discover the remnants of a lost superphylum or kingdom, viruses mutate much too quickly for any informative signal to be preserved.
The reality is that we've only sequenced a tiny fraction of the Earth's biodiversity. There's a lot of stuff out there that's just more of the same, especially at the microbe level. The farther back you go, the lower the likelihood of finding a surviving isolate, which is why isolated biomes like Lake Vostok and the drilling site in Northern Ontario are so important.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The team believes that the virus may carry the genes from a long-dead branch of the tree of life, one that possibly even started on Mars or somewhere else.
Other scientists are skeptical
No shit? That's one heck of an extraordinary claim right there. It'd be very fascinating if true, but that's going to need some strong evidence backing it. Either way, a virus of its size is still quite interesting.
Dna in the virus. Composed of the same nucleotides found in all life on earth.
So either all life on earth originated on mars (or somewhere), or these viruses originated on earth.
One case makes them simply interesting, the other makes for much better headlines and vastly more grant money.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
There is a difference?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Another example of how great marketing helps get your research funded. The reason this is being widely reported is because they chose a cool name. Pandoravirus. But how does Pandora's box come into this? When it comes to viruses bigger is lamer so size doesn't matter. It is not a threat to people nor anyone else except amoebas. The origins speculation is interesting, but this whole thing is being hyped up by the researchers. And possibly by the amoebas.
... one that possibly even started on Mars or somewhere else.
Science.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Try this one instead: In Soviet Russia, box of Pandoravirus opens you.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I think if you wanted to really terrify people, you'd name it Pandora's Pox.
Pandora is a Greek compound meaning all gifts (pan, as in pantheon--all the gods + dora, pl., as in Theodore--a gift of God). Just an FYI. I'd give the actual Greek but, alas, unicode support on /. does not have the greatest reputation. I see the term thrown about in literature sometimes, and I the think intent can be missed because folks only know the story from Hesiod. I suspect this is what Cameron had in mind when he thus christened the planetary home of his Lakota, er, Powhatan's Algonquin, ah... no, Na'vi, yeah that's what he called the sympathetic characters in his highly original film.
Well, you didn't spot the lack of an apostrophe in "worlds." Maybe editing is tougher than it looks ;)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
From TFA. The discoverers:-
The naysayers :-
I cite Occam's Razor -the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Apologies to the discoverers, but I think its far too early to point to any "ancestral cellular type that no longer exists".
Coincidentally, there was a Brian Cox doco on last night that mentioned the world's smallest insect, a wasp that measures 0.4mm, my 54yo eyes couldn't detect them but he described them as "very fine specs of dust". So a rough estimate says a young pair of eyes could pick out a group of less than 500 individuals. According to the same doco, if you exclude viruses from the tree of life then there is roughly 22 orders of magnitude between the largest trees and the smallest microbes. Basically the megavirus and wasp's sizes are less than three orders of magnitude apart, which is quite incredible since I'm used to thinking of viruses as basically large molecules (IIRC the smallest known viruses are composed of a mere 10,000 atoms).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The world's largest virus was discovered a long time ago. It's called Windows 8.
No left turn unstoned.
In NSA America world's largest virus discovers YOU!
The team believes that the virus may carry the genes from a long-dead branch of the tree of life, one that possibly even started on Mars or somewhere else.
Other scientists are skeptical
No shit? That's one heck of an extraordinary claim right there. It'd be very fascinating if true, but that's going to need some strong evidence backing it. Either way, a virus of its size is still quite interesting.
Easy to prove. Just compare the genetic material in the virus to all the other life we've found on Mars (or somewhere else).
Reading the article, I'm not sure if the scientist made the claim:
That life could have even come from another planet, like Mars. "At this point we cannot actually disprove or disregard this type of extreme scenario," he says.
So it seems like maybe the reporter posits that it came from Mars, and the scientist said, "Well we can't disprove that right now."
It's a bit more complicated than that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_classification