Scientists from the Structural and Genomic Information (IGS) laboratory and from the University Aix-Marseille, France claim that a virus isolated in the Pacific Ocean off Chile's coast is the largest known so far in the world.
The megavirus chilensis was found off the coast of Las Cruces, in central Chile, during a general biology investigation. With a diameter of 0.7 microns (thousandths of a millimetre), the megavirus is 10 to 20 times larger than the average virus, which includes the mimivirus, found in 1992 in a water-cooling tower in the United Kingdom.
"It is larger than some bacteria. An electronic microscope is not necessary to see it as it can be seen with a common light microscope," stated Claverie.
According to Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, scientists and authors of the study published in the Journal of the Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the megavirus probably infects amoebas, unicellular organisms that float free in the sea. The megavirus has hair-like structures or fibrils outside the shell, or capsid, which will probably attract the amoebae. According to a DNA study, the virus has more than 1,000 genes, reports the BBC. Furthermore, it was discovered that it has the capacity to build large Trojan organelles – cells within cells – that can produce new viruses to infect other amoebae.
FIS