A group of Brazilian and French scientists has discovered a new virus unknown to date. It already has a name - yadavirus - and also attracts the attention and concern of many readers. Inevitable at this time when the coronavirus (covid-19) has infected more than 40,000 people in less than two months and keeps everyone in suspense. But do not worry. If yadavirus has jumped into the media, it is not because of its contagious ability but because of the strangeness and even admiration it arouses in researchers who have found it.
It turns out that more than 90% of its genome had never been described before . This means that it treasures a total of 68 completely unpublished genes. Only six have counterparts, although distant, registered in public databases. As their 'conquerors' tell in a study just published by the magazine 'bioRxiv', it measures about 80 nanometers and its genome consists of 44,924 base pairs for 74 genes.
These are some of the characteristics that make the authors think "in an entity that could represent the first virus isolated from Acanthamoeba [a type of amoeba] in an alternative evolutionary scenario." Contrary to what is seen in other isolated amoeba viruses, says one of the authors of the paper, the virologist Jonatas Abrahao, "the yaravirus is not represented by a large particle and a complex genome, but at the same time it has an important number of genes not previously described, including one that encodes a new main capsid protein. "
It is a rare virus in the environment, specifically found in an artificial lake (Pampulha) located in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte . Apparently, one of the researchers discovered him while searching for 'giant' viruses in that lake. By chance, along with the big ones, he located one extremely small and very different from those who have the habit of infecting amoebas.
In honor of Yara, the queen of the waters in Brazilian mythology , he was baptized as a yaravirus and now that it is known of its existence, it can be said that "it constitutes a new lineage of the amoebal virus with a disconcerting origin and evolutionary development," they point out. the scientists. "Yaravirus expands our knowledge of the diversity of DNA viruses."
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