Giant virus revived

[John Griessen]

Why do you think this ancient virus stayed viable?

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2014/03/giant-virus-revived-after-more-30000-years?et_cid=3803146&et_rid=54736597&location=top

Did it maybe have so much redundant DNA that it is hard to really kill it?

[Keys Wolfram]

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soon you'll see some new bio-weapons!

[Katherine Gordon]

Redundant DNA I like that....thanks....Im making a film about the discovery of the giant virus and Im interested in anyone who may want to construct a replica of the huvrtech.com huvr board. I have contacted the development team directly but that said, I want to create something for the purrposes of our film..It will be used during the rescue sequence to allow persons to stay clear of the contaminated zone during extraction manuevers...I know this is a big charge and my sound ambitious but ...what do you think anyone???

[Mike Horwath]

Very cool discovery!  Although, I'm glad this is just an amoeba-infecting virus....
The original article on pubmed, if you happen to have access to PNAS:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24591590
A nice writeup at nature.com:
http://www.nature.com/news/giant-virus-resurrected-from-30-000-year-old-ice-1.14801

I think it probably does have more redundancy than most viruses.  Taking a quick look at the article, the viral genome has about 450 predicted protein-coding sequences.  HIV only has about a dozen proteins even after post-transcription cutting.   Smallpox is relatively big virus, I think it has about 200...

I'd guess another big factor in its "survival" is simply that you only need 1 virus to start up a new infection.  If only 0.01% are still viable, but you have 10,000 frozen viruses, you could revive it.

@scriptdoc:  slow down there... HUVR is definitely a hoax, probably a publicity stunt for a new back-to-the-future movie or something.

Mike

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

By the way, hunting for these giant viruses would be an awesome and very accessible DIYbio project!

They're essentially just growing amoebas in a Petri dish, and then looking for viruses that will kill the amoebas. Many of those amoeba killing viruses turn out to be giant viruses. They're chock full of genes we've never seen anywhere before, *and* you can see them with a good light microscope!

Patrik