Giant viruses played a key role in early life, study in Yellowstone hot spring suggests

The seething, microbe-rich hot springs of Yellowstone National Park are a model of the conditions in which life emerged on early Earth, many researchers think. Now, a study of one Yellowstone hot spring suggests so-called “giant viruses” played a key role in those primordial ecosystems and may have helped drive early steps in evolution. The study, published today in Communications Biology , drives home that “understanding ancient virus evolution may be key to our understanding of [life’s] early developments,” says Simon Roux, a microbiologist at the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute who was not involved in the work. Giant viruses have amazed biologists since their discovery in 2003. They can be larger than some bacteria, their genomes are many times bigger than those of most viruses, and they have some characteristics of bacteria and other cellular forms of life. Biologists have found giant viruses in the deep sea and hiding in the genomes of red algae . They also inhabit hot springs —places Andreas Weber, a biochemist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, calls “time capsules that provide a window into early eukaryotic life.” To learn more about how well-established giant viruses are in hot springs and what role they play there, Rutgers University genome scientist Debashish Bhattacharya and his colleagues harnessed new technologies for sequencing and analyzing DNA. T...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research