
'Virus-eater' discovered in Antarctic lake - georgecmu
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110328/full/news.2011.188.html
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cal5k
Woah.

I know it's far too early to really speculate, but speculate I shall: would
there be any inherent benefit in potentially using virophages instead of
macrophages for treatment of viral infection? Macrophages haven't caught on in
the west because they're quite cumbersome to produce and use, and obviously
pharma companies have no interest in advancing macrophage treatments.

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joeyo

      > and obviously pharma companies have no interest in
      > advancing macrophage treatments.
    

At the risk of seeming thick, why is that exactly?

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biot
Some speculate that drug companies don't bother working on cures because it's
far more profitable to sell perpetual treatments.

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kiba
Would anybody be interested in one-time multibillion dollars profit-making
opportunities?

What prevent such formation of profit-making opportunities?

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danssig
There is an insane amount of money in drugs. Some of this money can be used to
erect barriers to entry against such profit seekers. I don't know that that's
the case, but it could be speculated at least.

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orblivion
Really you'd call it the opposite of eating, if anything, right? Viruses
inject DNA into their victim, and the victim explodes with clones.

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woadwarrior01
Yes, but I think its a tad bit more meta. At the risk of sounding like a total
idiot, I'd conjecture that the virophage injects DNA into its victim, a virus.
Which in turn injects its DNA into its victim, a cell. The cell explodes with
clones of the virophage instead of the target virus, which go on to infect
more viruses. Thus systematically reducing the number of viruses with each
iteration by cutting into their only replication mechanism.

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mrpsbrk
This i would say lends loads of support to the "RNA world" hypothesis (that
says RNA replication is the basic mechanism of life and DNA is just like
storage of sorts, like RNA=RAM, DNA=HD)...

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ohashi
I feel like I should be surprised, but it seems everything eats something and
is eaten by something else.

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rmccue
So, where exactly is "eastern Antarctica"? The Australian sector?

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haribilalic
Eastern Antarctica is everything from 0° 0′ 0" E to 180° 0′ 0" E. If you take
a look at the map of Antarctica on Wikipedia[1], it will be everything to the
right of the centre line. So, yes, the Australian Antarctic Territory is the
major part of Eastern Antarctica, but it's not the only one.

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Location_...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Location_Antarctica.svg)

