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Researchers at Stanford University have discovered a virus-like “life form” that lives in the human mouth and intestines.
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Although smaller than viruses and not considered standard life, their genetic material can convey information that cells can read.
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We had no idea these things existed, and we’re still not sure what they do.
I don’t know if it’s interesting that scientists have discovered a new “life form” inside our bodies. Tiny bits of RNA, smaller than viruses, have the power to colonize bacteria in our mouths and intestines and transmit information that cells can read.
A team of Stanford University scientists writing about the discovery called it “very strange.” Nature, this discovery was given the name Obelisk. And we…don’t really know their end goal.
“It’s insane,” said Mark Pifer, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. science. “The more you look, the weirder things you see.”
The virus, named obelisk because of its rod-like structure, is even smaller than a virus, but it is still capable of transmitting instructions to cells. But we don’t know what they’re saying.According to the explanation written in conversation Ed Feil, professor of microbial evolution at the University of Bath, calls obelisks “circular pieces of genetic material that contain one or two genes and self-assemble into a rod-like shape.”
They are potentially a bit of a “living entity.” A preprint paper from Stanford University calls viruses “something like viroids,” and viroids are one step below viruses. Viruses need a host to replicate, but they haven’t slowed down. Viruses are so abundant that we forget to count how many viruses exist in this world.
But viroids are even simpler, fragments of genetic RNA that can’t make proteins but can be reassembled, and are known to plague flowering plants.
“The newly discovered biological entity lies somewhere between a virus and a viroid,” Feil wrote. He added that, like viroids, obelisks have a circular, single-stranded RNA genome and no protein coat. However, like viruses, their genomes contain genes predicted to code for proteins.
And Stanford University researchers didn’t just discover one of them. They discovered nearly 30,000 obelisks of different types. It’s just for beginners. They were present in every demographic corner of the world and were usually found in the mouth (and even in the intestines).
Now you need to decide whether these obelisks are friend or foe. Scientists want to know what role the host cells, bacteria and fungi, they need to replicate play in their function, and what their true purpose is.
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