Mimivirus

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? Mimivirus Template:Taxobox begin placement virus Template:Taxobox group i entry
Genus:	Mimivirus
Species:	Acanthamoeba polyphaga mimivirus

|} The mimivirus is a giant double-stranded DNA virus with mature particles of 400 nm in diameter (icosahedral capsid). It has approximately 1,200,000 bases and 900 genes. It was first discovered in 1992 in an industrial cooling tower in Bradford in England and identified in 2003 by researchers at the Université de la Méditerranée in Marseille in France. The virus, discovered during research into Legionellosis (the cause of Legionnaire's Disease), was found inside the water-borne amoeba Acanthamoeba polyphaga. The virus showed up in a gram stain, and was mistakenly thought to be a gram-positive bacteria, and named "Bradfordcoccus". Human blood samples have also revealed antibodies and the virus is thought to have at one time caused a type of pneumonia. Although it was once a suspect in the pneumonia outbreak in Bradford, today scientists believe that the virus can only infect amoebas.

Later research from the same university, as published in Science, following the sequencing of the virus in 2004 give these measures: 800 nm long, 1,181,404 bp, 1262 genes. Only ten percent is junk DNA. In March 2006, New Scientist put the figure at 911 genes, and 1.2 million bases.

Jean-Michel Claverie, from the Université de la Méditerranée says about Mimi: "It makes this DNA virus look like a new kind of parasitic life-form."

1 Alive?
2 Sources
3 External links
4 See also

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Alive?

Recently scientists have declared that, as the virus particle is capable of generating its own proteins, it is in fact considered a living organism, an idea which adds to the confusion of virus classification. Mimivirus, with its 911 protein-coding genes, codes for 50 proteins never before seen in viruses, including chaperones to assist protein folding and proof reading enzymes. It represents a new family of "nucleocytoplasmic" large DNA viruses that emerged with the first life on Earth some four billion years ago. It has even been suggested that Mimivirus is a fourth domain of life, next to the eukaryotes, procaryotes and Archaea. Because its lineage is very old and could have emerged prior to cellular organisms, Mimivirus has added to the debate over the origins of life.

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Sources

New Scientist, Issue 2544, 25 March 2006.
La Scola B, Audic S, Robert C, Jungang L, de Lamballerie X, Drancourt M, Birtles R, Claverie JM, Raoult D. A giant virus in amoebae. Science. 2003 Mar 28;299(5615):2033. PMID 12663918
Press Release: Mimivirus: discovery of a giant virus, Paris, 28 March, 2003.
Raoult D, Audic S, Robert C, Abergel C, Renesto P, Ogata H, La Scola B, Suzan M, Claverie JM. The 1.2-megabase genome sequence of Mimivirus. Science. 2004 Nov 19;306(5700):1344-50. PMID 15486256