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."

Comments

Re:Just a little

[Samantha Wright]

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.

Best read with a Thomas Dolby intonation

[Empiric]

... one that possibly even started on Mars or somewhere else.

Science.

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[cold fjord]

Try this one instead: In Soviet Russia, box of Pandoravirus opens you.

Pandoravirus isn't such a terrifying name

[Anonymous Coward]

I think if you wanted to really terrify people, you'd name it Pandora's Pox.

Competing theories

[Camael]

From TFA. The discoverers:-

"We believe that those new Pandoraviruses have emerged from a new ancestral cellular type that no longer exists," he says. 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.

The naysayers :-

The virus's size is probably part of its survival strategy. Amoebas and other simple creatures could mistake it for bacteria and try to eat it, opening them up to infection. "The internal environment of the amoeba cell provides a very good playground for acquiring various kinds of genes from different sources," Koonin says. He thinks that the Pandoravirus's unusual genome may be a mishmash of random genetic material it's sucked up from its hosts.

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".

This is old news

[shikaisi]

The world's largest virus was discovered a long time ago. It's called Windows 8.