Scientists have discovered never-before-seen viruses that thrive in sunlit oceans from pole to pole and infect plankton. They dubbed the newfound microbes “mirusviruses” — “mirus” meaning “strange” in Latin.
The researchers concluded that mirusviruses belong to a large group of viruses called Duplodnaviria, which includes the herpesviruses that infect animals and humans, based on shared genes that encode the shell, or “particle” enclosing their DNA. But the strange, newfound viruses also share a staggering number of genes with a group of giant viruses, called Varidnaviria.
This suggests that mirusviruses are a bizarre hybrid between two distantly related viral lineages, the scientists concluded.
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