Giant viruses may try out all sorts of funky lewks.
New images reveal the varied — and sometimes whimsical — shapes of hundreds of potential soil-dwelling giant viruses. One shape is dubbed “haircut” for its fibers that bristle like freshly buzzed hair. “Gorgon” has tubelike appendages snaking from its shell. And flaps poking out of “turtle” resemble the reptile’s head, limbs and tail, virologist Matthias Fischer and colleagues report June 30 at bioRxiv.org.
These and other peculiar-looking shapes “clearly tell us that we’ve underestimated how structurally diverse these viruses are,” says Fischer, of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany.
Since the discovery of the first giant virus in 2003, scientists collecting genetic material from the environment have uncovered a wide world of giant viruses (SN: 3/21/18). These viruses are roughly 10 to 50 times the diameter of viruses that cause the common cold. The genetic data suggest that giant viruses are diverse, widespread and abundant.
But genetics can’t tell us everything about a virus’s biology, says Steven Wilhelm, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. “We don’t know what we’re looking at, who it infects or what it could possibly be doing.”
Read the full article here