
A mysterious 80 nm amoeba virus with a near-complete “ORFan genome” - fbn79
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.28.923185v1
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chc
The title kind of makes it sound like "As far as we can tell, the virus has no
genes," but the actual discovery here is that the virus doesn't share any
genes with any other viruses that we know of. Which is still weird, but far
less mysterious than it sounded.

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monadic2
> Which is still weird, but far less mysterious than it sounded.

Mysterious, maybe, but what is its effectiveness against humans and how long
until it is recognized?

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ZenPsycho
this is an amoeba virus. most viruses do not harm humans. harming or killing
your host is generally a bad evolutionary strategy so viruses that do this are
relatively rare enough that unless a piece of writing explicitly identifies
specific harm to humans, you can assume it most likely isn’t harmful and never
will be.

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monadic2
> this is an amoeba virus. most viruses do not harm humans. harming or killing
> your host is generally a bad evolutionary strategy so viruses that do this
> are relatively rare enough that unless a piece of writing explicitly
> identifies specific harm to humans, you can assume it most likely isn’t
> harmful and never will be.

Can you say this virus is not harmful to humans?

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hdiriekei
Amoeba is almost as far away from humans as you can get.

It's like a Z80 Spectrum virus infecting a Windows computer.

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jolmg
I hadn't realized before that the virus analogy carried that far. That's
pretty cool.

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monadic2
Don't be carried away by their rhetoric.

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ufo
By the way, the name (Yara) is a reference to a mythical mermaid from
Amazonian folklore.

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ars
Related (different info, so not exactly a dupe):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276105](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276105)

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jeffdavis
I didn't know an amoeba could be a virus.

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muricula
I'm no biologist, but I think it's a virus which infects amoeba. By
definition, viruses aren't alive, and amoebas are.

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shanxS
> By definition, viruses aren't alive, and amoebas are.

Interesting, I thought we don't have a definition for "alive".

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dekhn
There's no universally accepted definition but most biologists would say that
viruses are not alive because they lack metabolism.

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DoctorOetker
right they are "not alive", but do have a "life cycle".

How else would one define what a single log reduction (one tenth of virus
particles surviving) means per given "UV dose" or _fluence_.

