What Are Viruses Anyway?#

Compared to your cells or even bacteria, viruses are incredibly simple. They are basically:

• A hull (like a shell)
• A tiny bit of genetic material (like instructions)
• A few proteins

They have no metabolism, no way to move themselves, and no ambition or will. They just float around, hoping to bump into something they can infect and take over.

Because they are so simple, scientists argue about whether viruses should be called living things at all.

• Some say viruses are alive.
• Others think the cells they infect are the actual living viruses (calling them viral cells), and the virus particles are more like seeds or spores.
• Many just see viruses as dead material.

The Mystery of Where Viruses Came From#

How something that needs a victim to reproduce could even emerge in the first place is a big mystery. There are lots of ideas:

• Maybe viruses were important steps when life first appeared.
• Maybe they started as escaped DNA from cells that got really good at making copies of themselves.
• Maybe they are descendants of really lazy parasites that just let others do all the work.

The current thinking is that viruses probably didn’t just come from one place or time; they likely emerged multiple times from different origins. But we honestly don’t know for sure yet.

Whatever the truth, viruses are incredibly successful. There are an estimated 10,000 billion billion billion viruses on Earth. If you lined them up, they’d stretch for 100 million light years, which is wide enough to span 500 Milky Way galaxies!

What Gyruses Look Like and Where They Were Hiding#

Gyruses look kind of funny, often like hairy geometric shapes or mini pickles. The key is they are much larger than all the viruses scientists knew before. This explains how they could have been hiding in plain sight for centuries. Scientists saw them under microscopes but just assumed they must be bacteria. It’s like suddenly finding out there are elephant-sized ducks everywhere!

Most gyruses found so far hunt amoebae and other single-celled beings.

How Gyruses Attack#

When a gyrus finds a victim, it connects with it and uses the cell’s own processes to get inside. Like all viruses, their main goal is to take over the victim’s internal setup and make more copies of themselves.

Imagine a tiny mouse crawling into your mouth and using your insides – your guts, bones, and fat tissue – to build a mouse factory. That’s kind of what a gyrus does.

• The gyrus dumps its attack proteins and genetic material inside.
• It rearranges the cell from the inside out.
• The cell’s parts – like its structural elements, protein-making machinery, and lots of mitochondria (for energy) – are changed to become an actual factory called a viroplasm.
• Some gyruses are fancy enough to build a membrane around the viroplasm to protect themselves from the cell’s defenses.

Once the viroplasm factory is ready, it starts building new gyruses, using up the victim from the inside until it’s completely full. Finally, the gyrus usually orders the infected cell to self-destruct, releasing the swarm of new gyruses to find more prey.

Unique Genes and Potential Metabolism#

It’s not just the number of genes that’s special, but also what these genes do. We used to think virus genes were just simple instructions to break into a cell and make more viruses.

But many gyrus genes are completely unique – basically mystery genes that no one understands yet. Even more confusing, a huge number of their genes are things you only expect to see in living things. These are genes needed to:

• Regulate nutrient intake
• Control energy production
• Perform light harvesting
• Handle replication
• Or just generally needed to keep cells alive

Some recent studies have even hinted that some gyruses with very complex genetic codes might be able to maintain a basic level of metabolism on their own. If that turns out to be true, it will completely change what we thought we knew about viruses!

Gyruses and Evolution#

We still don’t know anything for sure, but one idea about gyrus genes is that they might fundamentally change how their victims work and evolve. They could do this by:

• Integrating their own genes into the victim’s genetic code, merging into chimeric organisms (a mix of both).
• Or, the other way around, taking some host genes with them and changing themselves.

For billions of years, gyruses might have been living alongside and infecting cells, quietly influencing the development of life. Not just as a simple parasite, but actively jostling evolution in different directions by mixing genes around.

Defenses in the Microverse#

Even giants like gyruses aren’t completely defenseless. A few years ago, the world was amazed by the discovery of CRISPR, a system bacteria use to defend against viruses. It turns out some gyruses might have something similar – a kind of gyrus immune system against virophages.

Interestingly, virophages can also be used as a defense mechanism by living cells against gyruses. Some protists (single-celled organisms) have been found that integrated the genetic code of virophages into their own DNA and kept it. When these protists get infected by gyruses, they use that stored code to create virophages themselves, which then take over the gyrus factories inside the protist.

In the end, the protist would still likely be killed by the gyrus infection. But instead of releasing more gyruses to kill its fellow protists, it releases virophages to hunt those gyruses down!