Hot new virus, deep connections.

Abstract

Biologists of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries—call them natural historians—somehow got along without PCR, chip technology, mass spectrometry, or high-speed computers. From our vantage point in the 21st century we may wonder how our scientific ancestors, lacking our sophisticated tools, could have accomplished anything that we would recognize as forward progress in understanding how biology works. Yet they were in the enviable position that much of their biological world was completely unexplored; all they had to do to make a name for themselves was step out of their home habitat, usually Europe, and with a little luck they might find a new and wonderful organism, unlike anything previously known to science. Many examples of such discoveries can be cited (cycads, duck-billed platypuses, giant tortoises, Komodo dragons, and animalcules among them) and, in the most successful cases (think of Mr. Darwin), the new creature(s) dramatically enhanced our understanding of the structure and history of the biological world as a whole. Fortunately for the excitement quotient of modern-day natural historians, Mother Nature's reservoir of undiscovered bizarre and wonderful organisms is not yet empty, and a new one makes the transition from unknown to known with the report by Rice et al. (1) in this issue of PNAS. The new entry is a virus plucked from the near-boiling water of a thermal pool in Yellowstone National Park, and it is every bit as interesting to 21st century science as something like the Galapagos marine iguana (Fig. 1 A ) was to European science when it first came on the stage a few centuries ago. The new virus's host is the hyperthermophilic archaeon Sulfolobus sulfataricus , which grows happily at temperatures above 80°C and a pH of 2. Very few viruses of Archaea have been described to date [they amount to <1% of the viruses …