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    Home > Food News > Food Articles > More than 730,000 pairs of bases! Largest phage "appears" to date

    More than 730,000 pairs of bases! Largest phage "appears" to date

    • Last Update: 2021-03-04
    • Source: Internet
    • Author: User
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    Science and Technology Daily Beijing, February 17 (reporter
    ) virus is life? The question has not yet been settled. The prevailing view is that viruses are not life. But U.S. scientists recently wrote in the journal Nature that they have recently discovered giant phages, the largest of which have 735,000 pairs of bases in their genomes, and that these complex phages blur the lines between life and non-life.
    is a virus that specializes in infecting bacteria, according to a recent report on the American Fun Science website. Phages and other viruses are not considered living organisms, but that does not mean they are harmless. Phages are the main drivers of ecosystem change because they prey on bacterial populations, alter bacterial metabolism, spread antibiotic resistance and carry compounds that cause disease in animals and humans.
    to learn more about phages, the researchers retrieved a database of phage DNA samples from 30 different environments around the world.
    researchers say the average phage has 50,000 base pairs, but they found that 351 phages have 200,000 base pairs, four times as many as common phages, one of which has 735,000 base pairs -- compared with about 3 billion base pairs in the human genome.Jill Banfield, senior author of the
    study and a professor of Earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, said the genomes of these "megaphages" are much larger than those of many bacteria, one of life forms, and are "hybrids between traditional viruses and traditional biological organisms".
    researchers also found that these phages have many special genes, some of which are part of the CRISPR-Cas9 system used by bacteria to fight viruses. In addition, some phages have genes that encode proteins essential for the function of the ucose body. A nuclear glycosome is a cell machine that converts genetic material into proteins. These proteins are usually not found in viruses, and are often found in bacteria and ancient bacteria. Researchers believe that some of these giant phages may also use the kernels in bacterial hosts to replicate their own proteins.
    , co-author of the paper and an associate professor at the University of California, said: "The ability to translate errucose and proteins is one of the main characteristics that distinguish between viruses and bacteria, life and non-life. Some of the newly discovered giant phages have this translation mechanism, so they blur the line between life and non-life. ”
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