Open questions about giant viruses

Abstract

The recent discovery of giant viruses exhibiting double-stranded DNA genomes larger than a million base pairs, encoding more than a thousand proteins and packed in near micron-sized icosahedral particles, opened a new and unexpected chapter in virology. As of today, these giant viruses and their closest relatives of lesser dimensions infect unicellular eukaryotes found in aquatic environments, but belonging to a wide diversity of early branching phyla. This broad phylogenetic distribution of hosts is consistent with the hypothesis that giant viruses originated prior to the radiation of the eukaryotic domain and/or might have been involved in the partition of nuclear versus cytoplasmic functions in ancestral cells. The distinctive features of the known giant viruses, in particular the recurrent presence of components of the translation apparatus in their proteome, raise a number of fundamental questions about their origin, their mode of evolution, and the relationship they may entertain with other dsDNA viruses, the genome size of which exhibits the widest distribution among all biological entities, from less than 5 kb to more than 1.25 Mb (a ratio of 1:250). At a more conceptual level, the convergence between the discovery of increasingly reduced parasitic cellular organisms and that of giant viruses exhibiting a widening array of cellular-like functions may ultimately abolish the historical discontinuity between the viral and the cellular world.