Say Hello To The World's Largest Known Virus
Hello, Pandoravirus Chantal Abergel and Jean-Michel Claverie Let's hope it's friendly. The viruses that we're most familiar with, like the influenza virus, are small and simple. Influenza is about 100 nanometers across, and has only 13 genes. But scientists are beginning to realize that there's no reason a virus needs to be that small or that simple--and in fact, there are "megaviruses" that can be much, much bigger and more complex than any virus you've seen before. In a study published today in Science, researchers describe a newly-discovered megavirus that's the largest of its type ever seen. By volume, according to Carl Zimmer at the New York Times, it's 200 times larger than the flu, and has a whopping 2,556 genes. Even crazier, only 6 percent of those genes are familiar to us. The rest are completely new. The researchers have decided to give the virus the genus name "pandoravirus," referring to the...