The “Giant Virus Finder” discovers an abundance of giant viruses in the Antarctic dry valleys

@article{Kerepesi2017TheV,
  title={The “Giant Virus Finder” discovers an abundance of giant viruses in the Antarctic dry valleys},
  author={Csaba Kerepesi and Vince Korn{\'e}l Grolmusz},
  journal={Archives of Virology},
  year={2017},
  volume={162},
  pages={1671-1676}
}
Mimivirus was identified in 2003 from a biofilm of an industrial water-cooling tower in England. Later, numerous new giant viruses were found in oceans and freshwater habitats, some of them having 2,500 genes. We have demonstrated their likely presence in four soil samples taken from the Kutch Desert (Gujarat, India). Here we describe a bioinformatics work-flow, called the “Giant Virus Finder” that is capable of discovering the likely presence of the genomes of giant viruses in metagenomic… 
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28 Citations

Giant viruses of the Kutch Desert

The Kutch Desert (Great Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, India) is a unique ecosystem: in the larger part of the year it is a hot, salty desert that is flooded regularly in the Indian monsoon season. In the…

Ubiquitous giants: a plethora of giant viruses found in Brazil and Antarctica

The isolation of 68 giant viruses of amoeba obtained from environmental samples from Brazil and Antarctica are described, thus being the first mimiviruses isolated in this extreme environment to date.

Advantages and Limits of Metagenomic Assembly and Binning of a Giant Virus

The results indicate that genome-resolved metagenomics is a valid approach for the recovery of near-complete giant virus genomes given that sufficient clonal particles are present, however, the data also underline that the vast majority of giant viruses remain currently undetected, even in an era of terabase-scale meetagenomics.

Giant virus biology and diversity in the era of genome-resolved metagenomics

How metagenomics has revolutionized the authors' perspective of giant viruses by revealing their distribution across their planet’s biomes, where they impact the biology and ecology of a wide range of eukaryotic hosts and ultimately affect global nutrient cycles is discussed.

Giant mimiviruses escape many canonical criteria of the virus definition.

Virophages of Giant Viruses: An Update at Eleven

Their parasitic lifestyle as bona fide viruses of the giant virus factories, genetic parasites of their genomes, and then their role as a key component or target for some host defense mechanisms during the tripartite virophage–giant virus–host cell interaction are discussed.

Diverse viromes in polar regions: a retrospective study of metagenomic data from Antarctic animal feces and Arctic frozen soil in 2012–2014

Boiling Acid Mimics Intracellular Giant Virus Genome Release

This work generated four metastable infection intermediates in Samba virus and generated proteins that are released from Samba and newly discovered Tupanvirus through differential mass spectrometry, and revealed the molecular forces that trigger infection are conserved amongst disparate giant viruses.

The Complex Nature of Tupanviruses.

A Large Open Pangenome and a Small Core Genome for Giant Pandoraviruses

Phylogenomic analyses showed that P. massiliensis and P. braziliensis were more closely related to each other than to the other pandoraviruses, and of their relationships with viruses and cellular microorganisms.

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Giant Marseillevirus highlights the role of amoebae as a melting pot in emergence of chimeric microorganisms

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