© J. Abrahão and B. La Scola/IHU-Marseille/Microscopy Center UFMG-Belo HorizonteThe Yaravirus (dark smudges) infects amoebae and has all novel genes.
The finds speak to "how much we still need to understand" about viruses, says one of the researchers, Jônatas Abrahão, a virologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte.
Comment: And yet, Big Pharma is plowing ahead with mass vaccination programs to counter the viruses they 'still do not understand'. What could possibly go wrong??
Abrahão made his discovery while hunting down giant viruses. These microbes — some the size of bacteria — were first discovered in amoebae in 2003. In a local artificial lake, he and his colleagues found not only new giant viruses, but also a virus that — because of its small size — was unlike most that infect in amoebae. They named it Yaravirus. (Yara is the "mother of waters" according to Indigenous Tupi-Guarani mythology.)
Yaravirus's size wasn't the only thing weird about it. When the team sequenced its genome, none of its genes matched any scientists had come across before, the group reports on the bioRxiv preprint server.
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