Criss-Crossing Viruses Give Rise to Peculiar Hybrid Variants

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Criss-crossing viruses give rise to peculiar hybrid variants:

For millions of years, viruses have participated in a far-flung, import-export business, exchanging fragments of themselves with both viral and non-viral agents and acquiring new features. What these tiny entities lack in outward complexity, they make up for with their astonishing abilities to swap out modular genomic components and ceaselessly reinvent themselves.

In new research appearing in the journal mBio, Arvind Varsani and his colleagues investigate a recently discovered class of viruses that have taken the characteristic versatility of the viral world to new heights.

Referred to as cruciviruses, these minute forms reveal a fusion of components from both RNA and DNA viruses, proving that these previously distinct genomic domains can, under proper conditions, intermingle, producing a hybrid or chimeric viral variant.

Varsani, a virologist at the Arizona State Univeristy Biodesign Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiomics, is deeply intrigued with these new viruses, which are starting to crop up in greater abundance and diversity in a wide range of environments.

"It is great to see the research groups that first identified cruciviruses around the same time teaming up for the sharing and mining of metagenomic data with an aim to identify a larger diversity of cruciviruses," says Varsani, an associate professor with ASU School of Life Sciences.

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