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Earth Science

Scientists Discover Rare Giant Viruses Lurking In Harvard Forest Soil (sciencealert.com) 94

Posted by EditorDavid from the down-and-dirty dept.
MinutePhrase shares an article from ScienceAlert: There's a forest in Massachusetts that for nearly 30 years has hosted the world's longest running soil-warming experiment, measuring how hotter temperatures impact the tiny life-forms that live in the dirt... "Our goal was to isolate bacteria directly from the environment to understand how microbial communities are changing in response to soil warming," says biologist Jeff Blanchard from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass)... In this oversized outdoor research laboratory, scientists have made an unexpected discovery, finding 16 rare 'giant' viruses that are completely new to science...

These giant viruses were only discovered this century, and up until now they've usually been found in aquatic habitats. For that reason alone the Harvard Forest discovery is remarkable, as this represents the first time giant viruses have been discovered in a terrestrial ecosystem, and all from a single clump of dirt... "We recovered 16 distinct giant virus genomes in this study," says one of the team, bioinformaticist Frederik Schulz from the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute," but we are merely scratching the surface. If we sample more at the same site this number would easily double, triple, or even quadruple."
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Scientists Discover Rare Giant Viruses Lurking In Harvard Forest Soil More

Scientists Discover Rare Giant Viruses Lurking In Harvard Forest Soil

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  • A better article would answer questions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Sunday November 25, 2018 @07:46PM (#57698972)

    What hosts do these infect? How many genomes do they have! Can we put them in something now to have them mutiply?

  • Preference (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So should my first preference be for Stanford instead?

  • How giant are we talking about? Should I invest in new door locks and reinforced windows?

  • How many giants are around to be affected by these viruses??

  • Well now we know how nature is going to solve the overpopulation problem if we don't manage to reverse climate change.

    • We already knew that, haven't you read The Green Brain by Frank Herbert?

      You think this is exciting, wait for the next stage of development.

  • Here's what a Giant Virus is (Score:5, Informative)

    by skam240 ( 789197 ) on Sunday November 25, 2018 @08:40PM (#57699186)

    For those of you normals who also don't know how virus classification works a "giant virus" is this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org] . Basically they're large in size as far as virus' go which is still not very giant. This strikes me as one of those things that make sense when it's explained but why on Earth would a microscopic organism ever be described as giant?

    Anyways, nice summary slashdot.

  • IFO (Score:2)

    by cstacy ( 534252 )

    I, for one, welcome our gigantic overheated viral overlords.

  • Looks like it's once again time to thin out the herd. Please remember, keep the left lane open for people who know how to drive.
  • From the article, for more detail make sure to look at the link to the nature.com article https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
  • Does this have anything to do with the warmer soil? It looks to be more a test of a new method of identifying the viruses than a test of this soil itself. This kind of crap give climate change deniers more reason to complain about the data that is shown.

  • I am bowled over by the 96 channel microfluidic cell sampling gadget. To paraprase in english. It sucks in a sample of the forest microbes and deposits them in bunches of 5 to 15 in individual chambers, dowses them with lysis (cell wall breaking) chemicals in another chamber, finishes them off with something that breaks up the DNA and then puts them in another chamber to amplifly the DNA fragments. The resulting soup then goes in a DNA strand reader. And get this Slashdotters - the resulting sequences then go on to be processed "in silico" which for those at the back is a biologists way of saying "in a computer". The computer then uses some math to join up the strand sequences, compare the sequences between the 96 chambers and then to come out with a bunch of full and partial genomes of the 5 to 15 different cells in each chamber making use of gene librarys of previously fully sequenced organisms and viruses. They then go on to point out that some of these sequences are previously unknown to science and interestingly some of them are previously unknown giant viruses - viruses that are so large that they might be mistaken for bacteria by their size alone. A giant virus contains apparantly DNA which is found in no other organism and is also mostly made up of what we regard as junk DNA - that is DNA that does not code for specific functional proteins. There is speculation that the use of junk DNA to create new functional genes rather than mutations of existing functional genes may be a very ancient mechanism that life used to evolve by. Giant viruses could be a key to unlock the most ancient history of how life came into being. This certainly beats the latest clock frequency on an intel microprocessor for nerd interest I would say. What say you?

  • Fromt he summary,
    " finding 16 rare 'giant' viruses that are completely new to science...
    These giant viruses were only discovered this century,"

    Well yeah, since they were discovered recently enough to be reported as news, it would be in this century.
    Oh they mean, "Giant viruses were only discovered this century...", and not these 16 in particular.

    Now this is a summary that is basically a cut-n-paste of a summary from another site, but they couldn't bother to even read it first...

  • " ... we are merely scratching the surface. If we sample more at the same site this number would easily double, triple, or even quadruple."
    Umm ... you've never seen this before and you are making this prediction based on what exactly? One lump 16, two lumps 32, three lumps ....

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