A mysterious 80 nm amoeba virus with a near-complete “ORFan genome”

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.28.923185v1

by fbn79 • 6 years ago

37 26 6 years ago

chc• 6 years ago

The title kind of makes it sound like "As far as we can tell, the virus has no genes," but the actual discovery here is that the virus doesn't share any genes with any other viruses that we know of. Which is still weird, but far less mysterious than it sounded.

monadic26• 6 years ago

Which is still weird, but far less mysterious than it sounded.

Mysterious, maybe, but what is its effectiveness against humans and how long until it is recognized?

ZenPsycho5• 6 years ago

this is an amoeba virus. most viruses do not harm humans. harming or killing your host is generally a bad evolutionary strategy so viruses that do this are relatively rare enough that unless a piece of writing explicitly identifies specific harm to humans, you can assume it most likely isn’t harmful and never will be.

ufo• 6 years ago

By the way, the name (Yara) is a reference to a mythical mermaid from Amazonian folklore.

jeffdavis• 6 years ago

I didn't know an amoeba could be a virus.

muricula• 6 years ago

I'm no biologist, but I think it's a virus which infects amoeba. By definition, viruses aren't alive, and amoebas are.

shanxS• 6 years ago

By definition, viruses aren't alive, and amoebas are.

Interesting, I thought we don't have a definition for "alive".

undersuit• 6 years ago

It's just how you state what the virus infects. Like a potato virus, a protist virus, an apple virus, an Apple virus or a Windows virus.

erikpukinskis2• 6 years ago

A dragonfly isn’t a dragon it’s a fly.

ars• 6 years ago

Related (different info, so not exactly a dupe): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276105

A mysterious 80 nm amoeba virus with a near-complete “ORFan genome”

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