This is so freaking cool!\u00a0 You know, this is the kind of thing that just makes me giddy.\u00a0 It makes my otherwise crappy day all OK, but not only is the world weird, it’s weirder than you can imagine.<\/p>\n
So, the story goes, a woman has an eye infection that isn’t responding to antibiotics.\u00a0 Researchers investigate and find an amoeba in her contact lens solution.\u00a0 However, that amoeba is infected by a giant virus.\u00a0 OK, that’s interesting, but not Earth shattering.<\/p>\n
Now, here’s the wicked cool part.\u00a0 The giant virus is, in turn, infected with another virus.\u00a0 This virophage<\/em> actually uses part of the machinery in the large virus to help it reproduce.<\/p>\n Also, the smaller virus actually inhibits the reproduction of the larger virus.\u00a0 I can see some potential antivirals coming out of this discovery if we can figure out how that all works.<\/p>\n Here’s a link to the paper<\/a>.\u00a0 I haven’t read it and digested it yet, but I will as soon as I can.\u00a0 Apparently virophages aren’t brand new, they’ve been known for about 4 years now starting with the Sputnik virophage<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is just really neat stuff.\u00a0 Science is so awesome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is so freaking cool!\u00a0 You know, this is the kind of thing that just makes me giddy.\u00a0 It makes…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[50,48,49],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-science","tag-new-discovery","tag-virophage","tag-virus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}