Wee, single-celled creatures may chow down on viruses

[Judi Lynn]

By Nicoletta Lanese - Staff Writer 23 minutes ago

Teeny, single-cell creatures floating in the ocean may be the first organisms ever confirmed to eat viruses.

Scientists scooped up the organisms, known as protists, from the surface waters of the Gulf of Maine and the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Catalonia, Spain. They found a slew of viral DNA associated with two diverse groups of protists, called choanozoans and picozoans; the same DNA sequences cropped up in many members of the two groups, despite some of these single-cell organisms not being closely related.

"It would be like organisms as distantly related as trees and humans, or even more distantly related than that," said lead author Julia Brown, a bioinformatician at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine. "It's very, very unlikely that those viruses are capable of infecting all the organisms we found them in." After running a number of tests, Brown and her colleagues concluded that the protists likely consumed the viruses as food, rather than picking them up by chance or being infected by them. The team says their findings, published online today (Sep. 24) in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, could reshape how we think about the entire ocean food web, the network of who-eats-who that connects everything from tiny bacteria to plants to blue whales.

However, one expert told Live Science that the study doesn't conclusively prove that the protists actually ate the viruses.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/virus-eating-organisms.html