Ancient Virus 'Resurrected' From 30,000-Year-Old Ice In Siberia

Ronak Shah

Author-Ed Yong

Date: 03/04/2014

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/04/ancient-virus-ice-siberia_n_4895541.html

Summary: 

This article talks about how recently Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel led a group of researchers in the work to try and resurrect a virus in Siberia. This virus is one of the largest ever found, at 1.5 micrometers long it rivals the size of some small bacteria and has double stranded bacteria. The virus is also still infectious but only attacks amoeba. There are many surprising properties. Instead of attacking the nucleus, it creates virus factories in the host's cytoplasm. The most surprising part however, is the fact that though the virus is very large, it has a very small genome. It was thought that a property of a virus was to pack as much info into as small a space as possible but this virus is 150 times less compacted than any bacteriophage we know of. 

Conclusion:
This article directly relates back to our studies on microbes and viruses. This article relates to many of the studies we did on viruses because we learned about the shape of this huge virus is a little different than the traditional head-tail orientation. Also we studied both the Lytic and Lysogenic cycle and how bacteria normally recreate themselves and this giant virus is closer to the Lytic to the Lysogenic from what I have read. This also relates a little to what we have done on DNA because this virus is advanced in that it contains a double stranded DNA rather than a single stranded RNA. This also helps us relate it to our study on the volution of microbes because even though we know that it is not that old only 30000 years, RNA was a more simple way of copying genetic information so it is possible its origination is old.