Fascinating. It seems sensible (to a layman) that something would eat viruses but how would we construct tests (not trolling) to determine:<p>1. if the Halteria were not eating something_else, and that something_else was infected by the viruses?<p>2. if the Halteria themselves were not infected by the viruses?<p>3. are the Halteria trying to ingest the viruses, or are they just ingesting lots_of_things in the petri dish?<p>This observation seems interesting, assuming all other variables were constant and there was not some other interplay between the chlorovirus and other microbes which indirectly helped the Halteria grow:<p>>Halteria deprived of the chlorovirus, meanwhile, wasn’t growing at all.<p>Finally if the Halteria can ingest it and yet not be 'infected' by it then that seems awfully interesting as well.
I just learned about virophages a few days ago. Viruses and their relationship to other organisms or viruses is bizarre.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virophage" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virophage</a><p>I wonder if virovores could be exploited for medical purposes?
Would be fascinated to hear <i>how</i> the hell they do this microbiologically. This study just seemed to strongly indicate they do it.<p>I mean, as the consumER you'd have to (a) be resistant to getting infected by the virus in the first place, (b) encapsulate the virus in a way it can't broach, (c) deactivate and decompose it into nutrients you can use, no?<p>Which seems a tall order for something designed and continually evolving to breach your cell walls!<p>Granted, Halteria ciliates don't appear to be the virus' primary target, so potentially lack necessary binding points / are impenetrable to them, but that seems like playing with fire. Or eating plankton if plankton were carnivorous and rapidly evolving...<p>Although maybe it makes evolutionary sense if the Halteria:algae ratio is extremely low? I.e. it was never beneficial to target Halteria when more numerous food sources were colocated.
Love this mindset — “Given the sheer abundance of viruses and microorganisms in the water, he figured it was inevitable that — even setting aside infection — the former would sometimes wind up inside the latter.”
Very silly beginner question: Arent viruses non-alive? Arent virsus just DNA strands that if they fall into the right place in a cell mechanism, the cell mechanism will replicate them by mistake.
This reminds me of a question I have asked of those with more biology knowledge and not gotten a satisfying answer: Would there be adverse outcomes if we somehow killed all viruses?
I enjoyed reading this article, which gives a glimpse of the life of "wet science" researchers and the two phases - in vitro vs. in vivo (cf. the last sentence).<p>The fact that a virus can be nutrition is an effect of it being part of the physical world: "it's made of stuff". Computer viruses, in contrast, are pure information, hence their ingredients cannot be eaten.<p>Viruses are interesting because they are not alive, yet they replicate, which is at least one property of life forms; they are physically encoded information in a crystal hull.<p>The peer review process, which is being debated here, is a bit like UNIX: some of it sucks but half a century later we still haven't come up with anything better or nearly as good. Peer review is important, and I'm concerned about the floods of pre-prints that are often cited as if they were (already) scientific publications - many will never be. What would help to take out sloppiness, nastiness and generally poor quality in peer reviews is if journals also always had meta-reviewers (reviewers that review the reviews) like the computer science conference do that I publish in. One might say that is the role of the editor, but I see the editor more as a Program Committee Chair, higher-level role. A paper rejected by all reviewers unisono would be rejected, a paper accepted by most reviewers would be rejected and papers with controversial reviews could go up to the editor after potential adding another reviewer first, who could be tasked to address specifically disagreements. Reviewing should be part of postgraduate education (I teach my doctoral candidates how to do it), but almost nowhere is, so there are many sub-par reviews by people who are not mentored properly. Overzealous reviews often come from younger postdocs or first-year PhD students, whereas older faculty members tend to be more generous, IMHO.
"virovore"...<p>latin years in school flashback, but that word is malformed, because virus is Latin 4th declension and there's no -o stem in any case. seems "viruvore" would be more appropriate, and matches the forming of actual latin present active participle (think -ing in english) "virulens" (virulent).<p><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_fourth_declension" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_fourth_declens...</a><p>Assuming "virus" is 2nd declension leads to a contradiction, in there is an -o stem in a case, but that assumption contradicts the centuries old "virulent" which wasn't written "virolent".<p>And the reason i mention all this is that i have no idea how one finds modern etymologies for classical words without knowing the languages (or subsets of course) outright.
This seems pretty cool! I wonder if we can extend this experiment for other viruses like HIV, Covid etc to see if this Halteria can consume it. That would be ground breaking.
Can someone ELI5 no one ever thought to look for this in the first place? Viruses cause so many illnesses, would it be possible to release (possibly benign) bacteria that eat the illness causing virus into the body (assuming the bacteria themselves aren't attacked by the immune system)?<p>Also, is this an accidental discovery? Having read the article, I am under the impression that it is a bit of a chance find.