Scientists have discovered hundreds of unusually large, bacteria-killing viruses with capabilities normally associated with living organisms, blurring the line between living microbes and viral machines.
These phages — short for bacteriophages, so-called because they “eat” bacteria — are of a size and complexity considered typical of life, carry numerous genes normally found in bacteria and use these genes against their bacterial hosts.
University of California, Berkeley, researchers and their collaborators found these huge phages by scouring a large database of DNA that they generated from nearly 30 different Earth environments, ranging from the guts of premature infants and pregnant women to a Tibetan hot spring, a South African bioreactor, hospital rooms, oceans, lakes and deep underground.
Altogether they identified 351 different huge phages, all with genomes four or more times larger than the average genomes of viruses that prey on single-celled bacteria.
Read more at University of California – Berkeley
Image: Depiction of a huge phage (red, left) and normal phages infecting a bacterial cell. The huge phage injects its DNA into the host cell, where Cas proteins – part of the CRISPR immune system typically found only in bacteria and archaea – manipulate the host cell’s response to other viruses. The UC Berkeley team has not yet photographed any huge phages, so all are depicted resembling the most common type of phage, T4. (UC Berkeley image courtesy of Jill Banfield lab)