First 'Virovore' Discovered: an Organism That Eats Viruses (newatlas.com) 43
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Name a type of organic matter and chances are some type of organism has evolved to eat it. Plants, meat, algae, insects and bacteria are all consumed by different creatures, but now scientists have discovered something new on the menu -- viruses. Since viruses are found absolutely everywhere, it's inevitable that organisms will consume them incidentally. But researcher John DeLong at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln wanted to find out if any microbes actively ate viruses, and whether such a diet could support the physiological growth of individuals and the population growth of a community. "They're made up of really good stuff: nucleic acids, a lot of nitrogen and phosphorous," said DeLong. "Everything should want to eat them. So many things will eat anything they can get ahold of. Surely something would have learned how to eat these really good raw materials."
To test the hypothesis, DeLong and his team collected samples of pond water, isolated different microbes, and then added large amounts of chlorovirus, a freshwater inhabitant that infects green algae. Over the next few days the team tracked the population size of the viruses and the other microbes to see if the latter was eating the former. And sure enough, one particular microbe seemed to be snacking on the viruses -- a ciliate known as Halteria. In water samples with no other food source for the ciliates, Halteria populations grew by about 15 times within two days, while chlorovirus levels dropped 100-fold. In control samples without the virus, Halteria didn't grow at all.
These experiments show that the newly coined term "virovory" can now take its place among herbivory, carnivory et al, with Halteria crowned the first known virovore. But of course, it's unlikely to be the only one out there, and the researchers plan to continue investigating the phenomenon, including its effects on food webs and larger systems like the carbon cycle. The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
To test the hypothesis, DeLong and his team collected samples of pond water, isolated different microbes, and then added large amounts of chlorovirus, a freshwater inhabitant that infects green algae. Over the next few days the team tracked the population size of the viruses and the other microbes to see if the latter was eating the former. And sure enough, one particular microbe seemed to be snacking on the viruses -- a ciliate known as Halteria. In water samples with no other food source for the ciliates, Halteria populations grew by about 15 times within two days, while chlorovirus levels dropped 100-fold. In control samples without the virus, Halteria didn't grow at all.
These experiments show that the newly coined term "virovory" can now take its place among herbivory, carnivory et al, with Halteria crowned the first known virovore. But of course, it's unlikely to be the only one out there, and the researchers plan to continue investigating the phenomenon, including its effects on food webs and larger systems like the carbon cycle. The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Who needs bleach? (Score:3, Funny)
Or vaccines now? Just inject some virovores and all your covid worries will be gone :-)
I don't see how this could possibly go wrong...
A.
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(taking your answer seriously, for a moment...)
In the same way that gut bacteria are introduced, I wonder whether, once a few more virovores have been identified, that there may come a time when eating (something) will introduce them in sufficient quantity to make a difference (as opposed to reducing a virus by a tiny amount, but not enough to rid the body of it)
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No predator wants to eliminate it's prey. This is not a way to eradicate a virus, merely to reduce it's population and growth rate. You might get a "lynx/snowshoe rabbit" kind of interaction, though, where the virus population will crash (until the predator population crashes).
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That depends entirely on whether you can limit the ecosystem. If you introduce a bunch of rabbits to an enclosed environment and they breed like crazy, you can then release the lynxes who will eat every single rabbit until they die themselves of starvation.
The reason why predators don't eliminate their prey is not that they are "smart" and self-regulate, the reason is simply that the prey will eventually evade the predator by escaping its grasp. If you keep them from doing so, you can essentially use predat
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That's an argument that you might be able to make it work in a petri dish. It's not an argument that it could work in a human body.
(OTOH, perhaps if you can crash the virus numbers, the immune system could handle the rest.)
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Then you introduce bacteriophages to eat the eaters. And then... "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...."
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SKINNER Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
LISA But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
SKINNER No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
LISA But aren't the snakes even worse?
SKINNER Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
LISA But then we're stuck with gorillas!
SKINNER No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gori
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That's a self-solving problem: once the food source gets scarce, it's only a matter of time until the predator population declines.
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Some of you Russians need to go back to school but seriously, you need to go help Russia in that war they are losing; you're not fooling anybody here who isn't already a sucker.
Yeah pretty soon Putin is going to have to send his troll farm to the front too.
So just remember: The one with the rifle shoots! The one without, follows him! When the one with the rifle gets killed, the one who is following picks up the rifle and shoots!
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As a "lefty" (left handed), I don't understand your point. I don't have any obsessive compulsive disorders and have no opinion on whether Pfizer is "the good guys and did nothing wrong" except that I do know they are a greedy pharmaceutical company.
Re:Who needs bleach? (Score:4, Informative)
There's also the issue that viruses contain very little in the way of carbohydrates or other molecules that could be used for energy - the simplest viruses are merely naked strands of DNA/RNA but they are often covered in thin capsules made of things like lipoproteins and sometimes enveloped in a plasma membrane. You could obtain some nitrogen or maybe phosphorus from them, but that's about it. (I have a graduate degree in virology, fwiw)
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Viruses are loaded with nutritious nitrogen and phosphorous (like protein).
I wonder if they taste like chicken?
A cure for TDS (Score:2)
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Over an hour after the actual first post...pathetic.
Yeah. I got a FP half an hour after the OP last night, too. Very surprised.
Perhaps things were slow or partially down thanks to the recent weather events?
Eat _only_ virii and if so which ones? (Score:2)
It seems if that was all they ate that would make them safer for human injection say. But even so, do they eat only one kind of virus or are all viruses equally tasty/edible?
Re:Eat _only_ virii and if so which ones? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mod parent insightful!
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Viruses are almost pure protein and DNA/RNA. There's not much else there to contaminate excretions.
Kind of like drinking a protein shake.
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Cow meat IS a protein
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Re: Eat _only_ virii and if so which ones? (Score:2)
Mark Twain
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Good Viruses (Score:2)
Are there any? What's the possibility of bad side effects if this idea of virovore usage spreads?
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There are "good" viruses from a medical perspective, research into bacteriophages has been picking up for some time to treat infections and there is a lot of research about programming virsues to go after cancer cells. Still early days though.
This organism though is not a virus, it is a Ciliate [wikipedia.org]
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There are "useful" viruses. There's actually a lot of research going on in terms of using viruses as "trojan horses" against their own kind, or as a way to combat antibiotics-resistant bacteria because the viruses that kill those bacteria could possibly adapt as fast as the bacteria do, keeping the population on a level that our immune system can then handle.
You wouldn't want to have the virophage (wouldn't that be the more apt term for that organism, btw?) in such an environment.
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You wouldn't want to have the virophage (wouldn't that be the more apt term for that organism, btw?) in such an environment.
Virus is from Latin, and -phage is a Greek ending. Scientists often don't like mixing these two languages when coining new words.
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Are there any? What's the possibility of bad side effects if this idea of virovore usage spreads?
Wild bacteriophages are useful for controlling pathological bacteria. Giving your disease a disease is a neat trick. In principle, this could be extended to other pathological organisms including fungi and protozoa like the one that causes malaria.
Purpose built viruses are useful for vaccines including the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid 19 vaccine. Viri are also the backbone of genetic engineering include gene therapy.
You will eat .. (Score:1)
I'm Hesitant About This (Score:2)
SyFy Channel greenlights "Virovore" (Score:2)
When a global catastrophe strikes due to release of a virus that causes humans to die when injected into the bloodstream and also causes sharks to grow wings and spread the virus through their bites, a small team of determined researchers and the U.S. military must combat flying sharks while coming up with a cure to save humanity.
Spoiler: Humanity is saved when the cure, a Virovore, starts spreading among the shark population but all the sharks still have their wings at the end of the movie. Leaves the po
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Virovore III: When Pigs Fly
Just the start. Should be a lot coming on this. (Score:4, Interesting)
Note that there are a LOT of types of virus out there, so I expect THIS virovore will only go after a modest subset of them but there are a lot of others.
Also: Being eaten by a virovore is an opportunity to evolve to be able to infect the virovore and use IT for reproduction. So, in the eternal red queen's race of evolution, virovores need to develop ways to couter that. Some of them should be novel (to human science) and a valuable basis for drug and treatment development.