Mollivirus sibericum : Scientists Discover New Giant Virus (Sep 9, 2015)
The saga of giant Acanthamoeba-infecting viruses started in 2003 with the discovery of Mimivirus. Two additional types of giant viruses have been discovered since: the Pandoraviruses (Pandoravirus salinus and P. dulcis) and Pithovirus sibericum, the latter one revived from 30,000-year-old permafrost in Siberia. A team of French scientists now describes a fourth type of giant virus isolated from the same permafrost sample.
Microscopic, genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metagenomic technologies have allowed the team, led by Dr Chantal Abergel and Dr Jean-Michel Claverie of the Aix-Marseille University, to draw a detailed portrait of this new virus, named Mollivirus sibericum.
“Mollivirus sibericum was initially spotted using light microscopy as rounded particles multiplying in a culture of Acanthamoeba castellanii inoculated with a sample of Siberian permafrost from the Kolyma lowland region,” they wrote in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Although no read sequences were close enough to detect known Poxvirus and Herpesvirus isolates in the metagenome of our permafrost sample, we cannot rule out that distant viruses of ancient Siberian human (or animal) populations could reemerge as arctic permafrost layers melt and/or are disrupted by industrial activities,” the scientists concluded.