Research uncovers a virus which infects a host that has a non-standard nuclear genetic code.Among eukaryotes with modified nuclear genetic codes, viruses are unknown. Until now it had been believed that the modifications to the genetic code effectively prevented new viral infections. However, researchers have now reported the first example of a virus that can be shown to have crossed the boundary from organisms using the standard genetic code to those with an alternate genetic code.
"The finding is significant because it means that virus-host co-evolution after a genetic code shift can be more extensive than previously thought", said researcher Derek J. Taylor, professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo.
"It shows that these viruses can overcome what appears to be an insurmountable change in the host genome," Taylor said. "So the fact that we haven't previously seen any viruses in these species with a modified genetic code may not be because the viruses can't adapt to that shift. It may be that we haven't looked hard enough."
The study, titled "Virus-host co-evolution under a modified nuclear genetic code," was published on Tuesday, March 5th in
PeerJ, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal in which all articles are freely available (
https://PeerJ.com). The team of scientists, all from the University of Buffalo, discovered the highly adapted virus - a totivirus - in the yeast species
Scheffersomyces segobiensis (a distant relative of human pathogens in the genus
Candida).