Planet Earth is brimming with with peculiar microbes. Recently in an artificial lake, it could be possible that scientists have discovered as what seems to be the most peculiar of all. Its pretty safe to assume that a new gene of virus has been discovered which has never been discovered before.
Almost two years ago, the team of scientists gathered water samples from Lake Pampulha, an artificial lagoon in the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, but when the team went back to the lab and added these samples to amoeba cells to try to catch giant viruses in their attempt to infect the cells, they found a much smaller intruder.
According to Jônatas Abrahão, an associate professor in the microbiology department of the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, it was really a big surprise since so far they had only know giant viruses infecting amoebas, not small viruses., an. Abrahão told Live Science that the new virus measured about 80 nanometres in diameter, but all amoeba-infecting viruses that they had known of till date were much larger, at more than 200 nano meters.
The scientists called the tiny virus the “Yaravirus” after “Yara,” the mother of water
Upon analyzing the microbe’s genome, they came to find out that the virus was never seen before. They kept searching for the Yaravirus’ gene signature in thousands of environmental genomic data and found no clue which apparently indicates how rare this virus is
But the good news is that, Yaravirus doesn’t infect human beings.
The group of scientists wishes to scan the characteristics of the newly found virus in order to understand how it interacts with amoebas and other hosts, and to figure out the microbe’s origin and how it evolved.