Frederik Schulz, a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, and his colleagues have found out four new species of giant viruses. It was published in the magazine Science.

A Translational system is used to make protein using RNA. But, viruses found until now don’t have it. So they can synthesize protein only when they are parasitic on an organism.

 Interestingly, one of new viruses, called Klosneuvirus, has perfect translational system.

It has 25 tRNAs which can synthesize amino acid, monomer of protein, and 19 core tRNA synthetases, to name a few. RNA is an acid in the chromosomes of the cells of living things which plays an important part in passing information about protein structure between different cells. RNA is an abbreviation for `ribonucleic acid'. (Source – Naver dictionary)

 Professor 이태권, one of the researchers, said “ It is assumed that the virus has evolved into this translational system for effective propagation.”

As giant viruses which have size equal to germ are continuously discovered, some people in academia demand that it is not applicable to three-domain classification system but a new domain. The three-domain system is a biological classification introduced by Carl Woese et al. in 1977 that divides cellular life forms into archaea, bacteria, and eukaryote domains. In particular, it emphasizes the separation of prokaryotes into two groups, originally called Eubacteria (now Bacteria) and Archaebacteria (now Archaea). (Source – Wikipedia)

April 8, 2017 Junsoo Kwon