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The mimivirus is a giant virus with mature particles of 400 nm in diameter (icosahedral capsid). It has 800,000 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 in the water-borne amoeba Acanthamoeba polyphaga. Human blood samples have also revealed antibodies for the virus.
Later research from the same university, as published in Nature, following the sequencing of the virus in 2004 give these measures: 800 nm long, 1.2 Mbp, 1260 genes. Only ten per cent is junk DNA.
Jean-Michel Claverie, from the above institute says about mimi: "It makes this DNA virus look like a new kind of parasitic life-form."
Alive?
Recently scientists have declared that as the virus particle is capable of generating its own proteins, it is in fact a living organism[1] (http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041011/full/041011-14.html), an idea adding to the confusion of virus classification. Mimi codes for 50 proteins, that have 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.
Sources
- Science, Vol 299, Issue 5615, page 2033, 28 March 2003.
- Press Release: Mimivirus: discovery of a giant virus (http://www.cnrs.fr/cw/en/pres/compress/mimivirus.htm), Paris, March 28, 2003.
- Science, Raoult D., et al., published online, doi:10.1126/science.1101485 (2004).
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