Thirty-thousand-year-old distant relative of giant icosahedral DNA viruses with a pandoravirus morphology

Giant DNA viruses are visible under a light microscope and their genomes encode more proteins than some bacteria or intracellular parasitic eukaryotes. There are two very distinct types and infect unicellular protists such as Acanthamoeba. On one hand, Megaviridae possess large pseudoicosahedral cap...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Main Authors: Legendre, Matthieu, Bartoli, Julia, Shmakova, Lyubov, Jeudy, Sandra, Labadie, Karine, Adrait, Annie, Lescot, Magali, Poirot, Olivier, Bertaux, Lionel, Bruley, Christophe, Couté, Yohann, Rivkina, Elizaveta, Abergel, Chantal, Claverie, Jean-Michel
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: National Academy of Sciences 2014
Subjects:
Biological Sciences
permafrost
Online Access:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3964051
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24591590
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320670111
Description
Summary:Giant DNA viruses are visible under a light microscope and their genomes encode more proteins than some bacteria or intracellular parasitic eukaryotes. There are two very distinct types and infect unicellular protists such as Acanthamoeba. On one hand, Megaviridae possess large pseudoicosahedral capsids enclosing a megabase-sized adenine–thymine-rich genome, and on the other, the recently discovered Pandoraviruses exhibit micron-sized amphora-shaped particles and guanine–cytosine-rich genomes of up to 2.8 Mb. While initiating a survey of the Siberian permafrost, we isolated a third type of giant virus combining the Pandoravirus morphology with a gene content more similar to that of icosahedral DNA viruses. This suggests that pandoravirus-like particles may correspond to an unexplored diversity of unconventional DNA virus families.

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