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Hey there, welcome to Life Noggin!
Getting sick is the absolute worst, but it’s just a part of being well, alive.
On Earth every living organism has at least one virus that can infect it, from plants
and animals, to bacteria and single-celled archaea.
But what about non-living things?You’ve probably heard that viruses aren’t technically
alive, so can a virus catch another virus?
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so can a virus catch another virus?
Well, until recently, the answer was no.
Viruses are simple, submicrosopic parasites, a hundred times smaller than bacteria.
Without a metabolism or proteins for transcription and replication, they’re little more than
zombies, borrowing life from other creatures.
So if viruses can’t even keep themselves alive, how can they sustain another?
Nature, it seems, is always surprising us.
In the early 2000s, scientists discovered an exceptional virus that altered our understanding
of life itself.
At first, experts assumed it was bacteria, but what they’d actually found was a giant
virus, so large it could be glimpsed with a simple microscope.
Inside, this virus had many more genes than normal, encoding for proteins, metabolic pathways,
even replication machinery.
Experts named it the mimivirus, short for mimicking microbe, and soon they began to
find others just like it.
That’s when things got really meta.
Because while the mimivirus was a surprise, the discovery of its relative, the so-called
mamavirus, was a bombshell.
Slightly larger than mimi, the mamavirus turned out to be hiding an itsy bitsy virus of its
own.
With just 21 genes, this little fella, named Sputnik, is the first example of a virus infecting
a virus infecting an amoeba.
Since then, dozens of other virophages have been found, and while there’s still a lot
we don’t know about this madness, the basics are familiar.
After infecting its first host, Sputnik releases its DNA into the amoeba.
Unable to reproduce on its own, it then attaches to an already-present mamavirus, injecting
its genetic material into that second host too.
Once inside, this foreign DNA hijacks the host’s ‘viral factory’ so it can begin
to replicate, ultimately making it harder for the mamavirus to do the same.
It’s David and Goliath on a miniscule scale.
Today, we know virophages can infect both mama and mimiviruses, as well as plenty of
others.
As such, some consider them viral parasites, representing a whole new class of virus, while
others think they are too basic to be called even that.
Whatever they are, they’re probably important.
And we keep learning more and more about virophages and giant viruses.
In fact, just last year, a paper was published stating that some giant viruses, called Pandoraviruses,
are so large they can encode thousands of proteins, 90 percent of which are not seen
anywhere else on Earth.
Plus, not only do giant viruses appear to create genes, they also appear to steal them.
Sputnik and other virophages have remarkably similar genes to their hosts, which has experts
wondering if these giant viruses are defending themselves by stealing genetic material from
their viral parasites.
All that is still up for debate, but the idea that viruses can create and transfer genes
does fit well with another theory.
More than a billion years ago, a giant DNA-based virus is thought to have infected a budding
eukaryotic cell, somehow creating the first cell nucleus.
Like I said, nature is full of surprises.
Sometimes they’re scary surprises, but still.
So are there any questions about the body that you have for us?
Let me know now in the comment section below and your question could become a future video.
As always my name is Blocko!
This has been Life Noggin!
Don’t forget to keep on thinking.