“French scientists say they have discovered two new viruses so different from anything ever before seen on Earth that some have said they might as well have come from outer space. The new ‘Pandoravirus’ species are so named because ‘opening’ them (see note below) has spawned so many questions about the nature of life.
One was found in a freshwater pond near Melbourne, Australia, and the other off the coast of central Chile. They are larger than any other viruses ever discovered, and more than 90 percent of their genes are new to science. The largest is a full 1 micrometer long and can easily be seen through a standard lab microscope. It was found in sediments at the mouth of the Tunquen River in Chile and has the largest genome of any known virus.
‘One of our jokes is that either they are from outer space or from a cellular ancestor that’s now disappeared,’ said researcher Chantal Abergel from CNRS, the French national research agency. Viruses are technically not alive because they can’t generate their own energy. It’s thought that the Pandoraviruses were once live, self-supporting cells that downsized themselves to viruses by becoming viral parasites” (source).
The discovery of pandoraviruses, by a team of French scientists led by Jean-Michel Claverie and his wife Chantal Abergel, was announced in a report in the journal Science in July 2013. The viruses “are not harmful to people, the team emphasized: Most viruses infect other microbes. In fact, many pandoraviruses and similar marine viruses may have a beneficial—and unseen—role in nature. For instance, viruses prey on and thus regulate a lot of the ocean’s phytoplankton, which produces half of our planet’s oxygen and forms the base of the ocean’s food chain. Overall, the team added, the discovery of pandoraviruses ‘demonstrates our shallow knowledge of microbiology on Earth.’” (source).
Note: In classical Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman on Earth. In an act of revenge by Zeus because of Prometheus’s theft of fire, Pandora, Prometheus’s sister, was given a beautiful container – with instructions not to open it under any circumstance. Impelled by her curiosity (given to her by the gods), Pandora opened it, and all evil contained therein escaped and spread over the earth. Today, the phrase “to open Pandora’s box” means to perform an action that may seem small or innocuous, but that turns out to have severe and far-reaching consequences (see Wikipedia: Pandora’s box).
