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Scientists discover weird virus-like 'obelisks' in the human gut and mouth

Scientists have discovered mysterious virus-like ‘obelisks’ in the human gut and mouth. These tiny structures fall into the viroid class and seem to hang out inside of certain strains of bacteria, though not always.

We may have an adequate understanding of the human body in that, well, we invented aspirin and sequenced the genome, but researchers still find out new things about the humble homo sapien all of the time. “I think this is one more clear indication that we are still exploring the frontiers of this viral universe,” computational biologist Simon Roux of the DOE Joint Genome Institute at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory told Science. “It’s insane,” added Mark Peifer, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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