Scientists discovered the 'fingerprints' of mysterious viruses hidden in an ancient group of microbes that may have helped fuel the rise of all complex life on Earth: from fungi to plants to humans.
The acronym"CRISPR" stands for"clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats" and refers to a region of DNA made up of short, repeated sequences with"spacers" sandwiched between each repeat. Bacteria and archaea swipe these spacers from viruses that infect them, and thus, the cells maintain a memory bank of viral DNA that helps them recognize the viruses, should they attack again.
The team matched the spacers they found to longer stretches of viral DNA gathered from the deep-sea environment."It is fairly easy to sequence viruses from deep-sea sediments … but the challenge is to recognize which hosts these viruses infect," said Mart Krupovic, head of the Archaeal Virology Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and a co-author of the other."CRISPR spacer matching is the most convenient and most convincing and reliable approach to assign the host.
In the final study, Krupovic and his coauthors uncovered viruses in deep-sea sediments collected from the Shimokita Peninsula, the northeastern cape of the Japanese island of Honshū, as well as two other sites in the Pacific and one in the Indian Ocean. For example, the viruses named for the Norn Verdandi likely have tails that extend from their outer shells, or capsids, and the viruses named for Wyrd are likely lemon-shaped, Krupovic and his colleagues determined.
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