T ourists visiting the town of Klosterneuburg in eastern Austria often head for

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T ourists visiting the town of Klosterneuburg in eastern Austria often head for the 12th century monastery or the nearby memorial to author Franz Kafka. Virologists and evolutionary biologists, however, may one day pay homage to the town’s sewage treatment plant, which has yielded a genome that appears to be from the most cell-like viruses yet. These oddities, revealed on p. 82, challenge the controversial hypothesis that so-called giant viruses are descendants of a vanished group of cellular organisms—a fourth domain of life. Instead, the study argues, these outsized viruses have more pedestrian origins. “I found [the work] very convincing,” says environmental virologist Matthias Fischer of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. “Based on the data available now, I would not put my money on the fourth domain hypothesis.” Most viruses are much smaller than cells and need few genes because they replicate by co-opting the machinery of their hosts. Certain bird and pig viruses, for example, get by with just two genes, compared with nearly 4400 genes in a common strain of the intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli. Because viruses cannot reproduce independently and lack other hallmarks of cellular organisms, biologists have typically blackballed them from the club of life. The first report of giant viruses, in Science in 2003, jolted researchers. Not only are these viruses larger than many microorganisms, but they can carry more than 2500 genes, surpassing many bacteria. These behemoths required revisions to the evolutionary tree of life, some scientists contended. The standard tree has three main groups, or domains—bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. But several researchers proposed that giant viruses are leftovers of a fourth domain of life.

1.What are the titles and who are the first authors of your editorial and your article?

2.Write a paragraph explaining what is being investigated in your article, and why?

3.Briefly describe (1 to 5 sentences) how the researchers are investigating their subject. (You may answer this in general or specific terms, as you see fit)

4.List 2 words you did not know the meaning of before reading the article and give their definitions in your own words.

5.What is something that you learned, understood, or “took away” from this exercise?

Explanation / Answer

Ans 1) Title – Giant Viruses Might Belong To Fourth Domain of Life. The first author of the article is the Environmental Virologist.

Ans 2) In this article, the category of the virus is something that is being investigated. They range from something as small as two genes to large viruses with thousands of genes which are unable to replicate and reproduce on its own. It was initially found that viruses are only smaller in size and does not mostly was included in the life forms. However, with the large viruses, the theory gets controversial with the virus forming a fourth domain of life.

Ans 3) The researchers are investigating the subject by finding out the size of the virus and comparing it to the other life forms. The mechanism of the viruses is being compared to the other forms. The researchers are majorly working on finding if there is a fourth life domain necessary for categorizing the bigger sized viruses.

Ans 4) Blackballed and Behemoths

Ans 5) From this exercise, it is found that although the viruses depend on others for replication but it not necessarily is just few genes in construction. The viruses are available in number of size that may range from thousand to hundreds of genes

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