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Microbe With Bizarrely Tiny Genome May Be Evolving Into a Virus
sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: The newly discovered microbe provisionally known as Sukunaarchaeum isn't a virus. But like viruses, it seemingly has one purpose: to make more of itself. As far as scientists can tell from its genome -- the only evidence of its existence so far -- it's ...
Most of Sukunaarchaeum's mere 189 protein-coding genes are focused on replicating its own genome; it must steal everything else it needs from its host Citharistes regius, a dinoflagellate that lives in ocean waters all over the world. The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum's bizarrely viruslike way of living, reported last month in a bioRxiv preprint, "challenges the boundaries between cellular life and viruses," says Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities who was not involved in the work. "That's when we realized that we had not just found a single strange organism, but had uncovered the first complete genome of a large, previously unknown archaeal lineage," Nakayama says.
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