Scientists have discovered never-before-seen viruses that thrive in the oceans from the North Pole to the South Pole
The researchers came to the conclusion thatmirusviruses belong to the large group of Duplodnaviria viruses. This also includes herpes viruses. They have common genes that encode the shell that covers their DNA. The strange newly discovered viruses have incredibly many genes in common with the Varidnaviria group of giant viruses. This suggests that mirusviruses are a bizarre hybrid of two distantly related viral lineages, the scientists concluded.
Scientists consider new viruses to be chimeric becausethey are a mixture of two different groups of viruses—on the one hand, herpes viruses, and on the other, giant viruses. Experts described the strange new viruses in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The discovery highlights how little we know about the viruses lurking in Earth's oceans.
To find viruses, biologists studied dataTara Ocean expedition, which collected about 35,000 samples of ocean water containing viruses, algae and plankton from 2009 to 2013. The researchers then looked for evolutionary clues in the microbes' millions of genes.
According to scientists, thriving in the globalin the ocean, mirusviruses may become the key to unraveling the mysterious origin of herpes viruses. The genes that code for the protective coating around viral DNA are strikingly similar in both groups, suggesting they are related.
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