[HN Gopher] Scientists have discovered the first virovore - an o...
___________________________________________________________________
Scientists have discovered the first virovore - an organism that
eats viruses
Author : xiaodai
Score : 208 points
Date : 2023-01-03 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.unl.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.unl.edu)
| [deleted]
| novia wrote:
| Pretty sure we eat viruses all the time. Good to experimentally
| demonstrate that they are able to provide a benefit though.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Indeed. Only a small handful of viruses infect humans. An XKCD
| What-If was particularly enlightening for me: https://what-
| if.xkcd.com/80/
| divbzero wrote:
| Yes, I suppose the more interesting finding is the ability to
| grow on a virus-only diet.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I, for one, welcome our new vivore overlords.
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Virovoverlords?
| [deleted]
| water8 wrote:
| [dead]
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Would be fascinated to hear _how_ the hell they do this
| microbiologically. This study just seemed to strongly indicate
| they do it.
|
| 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?
|
| Which seems a tall order for something designed and continually
| evolving to breach your cell walls!
|
| 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...
|
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| > lack necessary binding points
|
| Viruses need far more than binding points to make use of a
| cell. They need to handle attachment, penetration, uncoating,
| gene expression, replication, assembly, and release. Some of
| these may leverage host machinery, or sometimes the virus packs
| their own. If they use the host, they typically need to have
| greater flux kinetics than the host. If they're able to do
| this, there's a chance they resemble a virus that the host
| already knows how to deal with. In that case, they'll also need
| to outmaneuver any existing intracellular defenses.
|
| That's a lot of evolution that has to happen to fit your
| target.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I think from the article the viruses don't target the ciliates
| at all but rather algae. That explains (a). I expect b and c
| are answerable with gradients and membrane mumbojumbo, but a
| programmer not a microbiologist. I actually like the study
| author am surprised that this hasn't been observed before. I
| would have expected viruses are food for something - as it
| notes they're little bundles of tasty proteins and useful
| elements.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| "virovore"...
|
| 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).
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_fourth_declens...
|
| 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".
|
| 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.
| msla wrote:
| If you're doing that, the Latin word "virus" means slime, so we
| should treat the English word as something entirely different.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I guess Greek "contagion" closer matches what English refers
| to with "virus" and it's repurposed meaning?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| "contagion" while Greek in ending looks like con-
| (together) and a Greek analogue of "tango, tangere, ... ,
| tactus" (touch). Like whatever happens with two things
| touching?
| atkailash wrote:
| [dead]
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| Cool name candidates for security people to use for their
| software.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Viruvore Antivirus LLC ? :)
| [deleted]
| weatherlight wrote:
| I just learned about virophages a few days ago. Viruses and their
| relationship to other organisms or viruses is bizarre.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virophage
|
| I wonder if virovores could be exploited for medical purposes?
| maxbond wrote:
| Seems like it'd be super useful for maintaining a virus-free
| environment in an ongoing manner in a circumstance where they
| would contaminate your results, but where the virovores
| wouldn't. Maybe there's a virus that you're able to account for
| in your methodology that you feed the virovores with, and they
| stick around and clean up other viruses that get into your
| culture.
|
| Or maybe in an industrial process they could help dampen the
| spread of viral outbreaks in your bioreactor.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Co-culture might be fine. But realistically it's probably a
| lot easier to add neutralizing antibodies or other peptides
| or chemicals which would block viral infection.
|
| For an industrial process it would likely be easier to just
| genetically modify your organism to be resistant to the
| virus.
| maxbond wrote:
| A nice benefit of the virovore though would be it would
| evolve to counter evolution of the virii. You could still
| treat with peptides &c but eventually they'll stop being
| effective. Against a highly adaptive organism it's probably
| best to employ multiple overlapping treatments. I'm not
| 100% sure it's this particular talk [1], but this
| researcher has a fascinating talk on this channel about
| using phage therapy in tandem with antibiotics such that
| bacteria resistant to the antibiotic are susceptible to the
| phage. Iirc they were able to clear up a life threatening
| antibiotic resistant infection in a patient's aorta with a
| single treatment.
|
| Genetic modification can be tricky in long-lived cultures,
| the organism you're cultivating may discard your
| modifications. There's things you can do to make this more
| difficult, but I can imagine a really general solution that
| works for many cultures could be super useful (say, for
| cultures you're speculating about productizing, but don't
| want to make too much of an investment in until you've
| characterized them better).
|
| I ran some wild west style, open air algae bioreactors for
| a while, and I'd fantasize about productizing organisms
| like this for pest control. Crazy things can happen in that
| sort of environment; I wasn't around at the time but there
| was a story about a storm which blew in from the against
| prevailing winds, carrying some weird kind of rotifer not
| normally native to that environment, and across the state
| people woke up to their ponds turning pink. In that kind of
| environment you're unable to anticipate which organisms
| will invade your ponds. I think it's possible those kinds
| of cheap, low-control methods of production will become
| very important.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/xvC8xME5Zrg
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I've known about phage therapy for a while. That's quite
| interesting in your last paragraph.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| There was a 1st Season Episode of Star Trek Voyager called The
| Phage where a bunch of aliens whose organs were being eaten
| away by some virus had to continuously harvest fresh new organs
| from unwitting travelers to stay alive. Is that fictional
| disease related to the real world virophage?
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Phage just means "something that devours".
| https://www.dictionary.com/browse/phage
|
| As far as I can tell, the Phage that the Vidiians suffer from
| has nothing to do with any real-world illnesses, except maybe
| something like Leprosy.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| In Greek, the word Phage or Fage means "to eat" so that
| might be the origin. Coincidentally, that's also the name
| of a pretty rich and thick yogurt, which I assume has
| nothing to do with viruses.
| [deleted]
| gz5 wrote:
| Fascinating. It seems sensible (to a layman) that something would
| eat viruses but how would we construct tests (not trolling) to
| determine:
|
| 1. if the Halteria were not eating something_else, and that
| something_else was infected by the viruses?
|
| 2. if the Halteria themselves were not infected by the viruses?
|
| 3. are the Halteria trying to ingest the viruses, or are they
| just ingesting lots_of_things in the petri dish?
|
| 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:
|
| >Halteria deprived of the chlorovirus, meanwhile, wasn't growing
| at all.
|
| Finally if the Halteria can ingest it and yet not be 'infected'
| by it then that seems awfully interesting as well.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Viruses as I understand it are generally fairly specific as to
| what they can infect. I don't think there's any reason to
| believe an algae virus infect ciliates. But again, I'm a
| programmer, not a microbiologist.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Cross-species infection usually happens (I _think_ ) due to
| mutation, rather than a single strain being able to target
| vastly different species.
|
| However, there are some that do. For example, the Powassan
| virus. Ticks pick up the virus from woodland mammals, and
| then transfer it to humans. However, ticks do not transfer
| the disease from human to human [0].
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powassan_virus
|
| We are probably much closer to mice and squirrels than algae
| are to ciliates though.
| stultissimus wrote:
| Biophysicist here. Excellent questions - these are the kind of
| points peer reviewers would raise (though typically in far more
| esoteric and passive aggressive ways...).
|
| (1) could be addressed in experiments where the algae-consumers
| in question are studied in monoculture (purified and grown in
| test tubes) with virus added artificially. This experimental
| design excludes the possibility that any middle man is present;
| if uptake is still observed, it must be direct.
|
| (2) Measure viral replication, perhaps in a similar monoculture
| experiment as above. If the viruses are infecting (exploiting)
| the Halteria, they will have non-negligible replication (they
| are stealing the Halteria's resources to advance their own
| replication). Viral replication could be assayed by qPCR
| (counting viral genomes) or similar assays.
|
| (3) This would require biochemical studies to determine the
| mechanism of uptake of viral particles. Typically, viruses are
| taken up (endocytosed) by cells as a result of interaction with
| receptors on the surface of target cells (prominently CCR5 in
| HIV, Ace2 for the COVID-19 causing virus). Of course, what
| biological systems are `trying` to do begs that we
| anthromorphize Halteria (or at least evolution), but one could
| conduct an evolutionary analysis to see if Halteria have
| progressively evolved receptors that improve viral uptake
| efficiency.
|
| As an aside, the discovery of virovores hints excitingly
| (albeit remotely) at the possibility of creating virus sink
| cells/technologies that could eliminate viral particles in
| humans. An important question will be whether viruses, which
| evolve far faster than eukaryotes like Halderia (let alone than
| humans), can turn the tides in the evolutionary arms race and
| become the exploiters of the Halderia. Perhaps it's reassuring
| that we exist (mostly) symbiotically with our microbiota,
| despite their far faster evolution.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > An important question will be whether viruses, which evolve
| far faster than eukaryotes like Halderia (let alone than
| humans), can turn the tides in the evolutionary arms race and
| become the exploiters of the Halderia.
|
| I'd assume that's the case, otherwise I feel like there would
| be more Halderia and/or less viruses
| panabee wrote:
| great answers to great questions.
|
| 1. the parent raised questions in a neutral way. these
| questions seem essential for validating experimental design.
| why would peer reviewers present such questions in passive-
| aggressive ways, and how can we fix this?
|
| 2. could you kindly recommend services/consultancies to
| validate experimental designs? if not, would you be open to
| consulting and doing what you did here -- suggesting ways to
| control for key variables? experiments relate to cancer
| research. contact info in bio.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-03 23:00 UTC)