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BORDERLINE. “Viruses have no chemical processes of their own.” https://lnkd.in/eHNQAPJ View in LinkedIn

TWO WORLDS. “We now know that about half of the world’s biomass and by far the majority of its genetic biodiversity actually occur as prokaryotic microbial communities. We also know that the visible biosphere of multi-cellular eukaryote macrobiological life represents a highly derived and constrained subset of life on Earth.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

NO NAMES. Viruses are not given Latin names like other living organisms (polio virus, rabies virus), except that Virus is Latin for poison. https://lnkd.in/eqw9nkU View in LinkedIn

NEW WORLD VIEW. “New insights from molecular analysis are forcing a recognition that there are, in fact, no completely objective individuals, no unique lineages, and no one true tree, at least in the quantum realm of prokaryotic dark matter,” and no fundamental gene units, no gene beads, and no gene strings. https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

HALLMARK GENES. “However, a small group of virus hallmark genes that encode key proteins involved in genome replication and virion formation, most notably capsid proteins, are represented in a broad variety of elements, comprising a substantial fraction of the edges in the evolutionary network. Virus hallmark genes do not have obvious ancestors in cellular life forms, suggesting that some types of virus-like elements evolved at a precellular stage of the evolution of life.” https://lnkd.in/eU7uHHB View in LinkedIn

UNIT PARADIGM SHIFTS. “Similarly, before metagenomic tools allowed us to see the prokaryotic world, classical biology held that individual organisms are the fundamental units of ecology, of evolution, and of biodiversity, and their evolutionary history could be explained by arranging them into objectively real, lineage-defined groups, with the groups composed into a single-rooted tree.” https://lnkd.in/ewnQ9Vg View in LinkedIn

BORROWED GENES. “Viruses with large genomes contain numerous genes acquired from the hosts at different stages of evolution.” https://lnkd.in/eU7uHHB View in LinkedIn

GENE SWAPS. “This evolutionary network apparently emerged owing to extensive gene exchange, often between widely different elements, as well as parallel acquisition of homologous genes from the hosts.” https://lnkd.in/eU7uHHB View in LinkedIn

POLINTON VIRUSES. “Recently, an evolutionary link has been identified between the virophages and large eukaryotic dsDNA transposons of the Polinton/Maverick family (hereafter referred to as Polintons).” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12728/full View in LinkedIn

“THE GIANT VIRUSES of the family Mimiviridae are themselves “infected” with a distinct class of satellite viruses, known as virophages, that reproduce within the giant virus “factories” inside protist cells and depend on the giant virus for their replication.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12728/full View in LinkedIn