![]() | Mimivirus was one of the Natural sciences good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
Current status: Delisted good article |
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
xyz1323: How can a "Mimivirus" live? It's a living organism, like any other virii. Did you sleep through biology class or something? -Alex 12.220.157.93 06:43, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
And then of course, there is the debate over whether or not (some?) viruses form a fourth domain of life. Grigory Deepdelver AKA Arch O. La Talk TCF 22:56, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
Nothing can live "independently". You'd die if you were dumped in a vacuum (and you wouldn't reproduce there, either). Even those autotrophs which can live completely without relying on other organisms (note: this group in particular already excludes all members of the animal kingdom... even though the word "animal" literally means "something which is alive") still need particular materials from the Earth's ground and atmosphere, and in some cases sunlight. For a species to live, it must have a suitable environment containing certain necessary features - and for virusses, one of these features just happens to be the presence of cellular life forms. -- Milo
Yes. The current human definition of "life" is nomothetic. Along the way it has been influenced by cell theory, etc. Facts are that until sentients discover any life that is not a collector and conduit, of/from a material or an energy source, all life must be considered somehow dependent.
Even "non-living" minerals come as elements created by stellar processes, and interactions dependent on the presence of other substances, even of the same general kind.
To advance the discussion, would suggest defining life more simply until a better way can be found:
How about that organisms are matter that can reproduce similar forms, transform over generations/evolve, are based on (or are themselves bits of) a code (DNA/RNA, etc.) and affect their environment whatever that is.
That might suffice at least until some beings manifest that do not fit this formulation. -- Ala Balsam Collestan — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.124.165.189 ( talk) 23:50, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
I think this page needs updating and some clarification of the "facts". From reading around the current given number of genes for Mimi is 911 (protein coding); with some news-sites quoting ~900, which is possibly where the original value came from at the top of the article. The common value given for number of base pairs is ~1.2Mbp 1,200,000 not 800,000. The language used in the wiki article suggests “bases” not base pairs; since the virus has double stranded DNA this is a little confusing?!
It might be nice to include a few speculative Mimi topics: the possibility of human infection, evolved to look like tasty bacteria to get amoeba actively hunting it...
http://www.virologyj.com/content/2/1/62
The NewScientist mag has recently written an article about Mimi, so its likely there will be more traffic to this page. It would be great if it wasn't just a bunch of links to sources. This article hasn't developed much since I came here a few months ago! I guess I could add some stuff if no one else is bothered :S ~~
Matt Oates 21:34, 25 March 2006 (GMT)
Whoa! Just came back to this page since I noticed a minor edit on my watch-list! Nice job Serephine, thanks :] I've nominated the article for GA status. MattOates (Ulti) 12:30, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
The article states:
Because its lineage is very old and could have emerged prior to cellular organisms, mimivirus[...]
Since virusses rely on cellular organisms for reproduction, and this trait seems to be integral to what a virus is, how could any virus possibly have existed before cellular organisms came around? -- Milo
Im a Microbiology student about to graduate, currently studying virology. From my understanding, there is a lot of debate within the scientific community about early primordial evolution of life from simple molecules and viruses are showing more and more prominence in the current theorys. Geneticly, Mimivirus diverged earlier than eukaryotic cells, because of its gene content and how that relates to euykaryotic genes. However, what we think of as a cell was thought to be very different at this primordial point, more like membrane bags that viruses popped in and out of while shuffling around their genes with each other. It is from this that different viruses emerged and then when cells as we know them emerged, the viruses modified themselves to infect them. Its much, much more complicated than that and there are a bunch of conflicting and interfering ideas on the subject. suffice to say that it was all a bit of a mess back then and what the sentence "Because its lineage is very old and could have emerged prior to cellular organisms" means is that the genetic content diverged largely as it is seen today earlier than the cellular lifeforms that we see today. It's complicated I know, heres an article that serves as a good starting point for the topic: -Evolution of complexity in the viral world: the dawn of a new vision. Koonin EV, Dolja VV. Virus Research volume 117 issue 1 page 1-4 Feb 2006-
Hope this helps, Numzana 23:28, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
Viruses have much simpler structure than cells. Viroids (RNA molecule with just 240 to 600 nucleotides or 10,000 atoms)have even simpler structures. Hence it seems reasonable that viruses and viroids were the first to emerge in evolution. At that time, there would be no cells, and these "creatures" would be just replicating using the available enzyme molecules in the primordial soup. Today, viruses can also be replicated biochemically without cells. Leslie Orgel conducted experiments where RNA nucleotides join to produce RNA, which later self-replicate. Spieglemen used protein enzymes Q-beta replicase to help Q-beta viral RNA replicate in test tubes and artificially selects virus RNAs to drive chemical evolution. DNA can be replicated using polymerase chain reaction (PCR). I hold the gene-centric rather than cell-centric view of life where cells are not necessary. The mimivirus you mentioned could well be a missing link of the evolution from viruses to cells, and not the other way round. It is easy to say that viruses are just "drop-outs" from cells, but it is important to ask: Where does the complex cellular structures with all its myriads of organelles like nucleus, ribosomes etc come from? As far as we know, the early days of earth was so hot that cellular structures couldn't have existed.
These early self-replicating processes are the viruses. They later got encapsulated by the bilipd layer to form cells. Hence viruses appear before cells.
I'd like to see the "notes" and "references" sections combined, so that they are all in-lined references. Otherwise I think it looks Good. Pete.Hurd 19:01, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
I'd like references for statements in the lead section, add links to "pneumonia", the reference "(M. Suzan-Monti, 2006)" at the end of the first paragraph of the "Replication" section should be in-lined. I think the section "Implications for life" could have a better title, maybe including the phrase --definition of "life"-- but I can't come up with one that I'm happy with... Pete.Hurd 19:38, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
The article says "nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses (NCLDV), which includes four other families: Poxviridae, Iridoviridae, Phycodnaviridae, Asfarviridae and Coccolithoviridae." That is five families, not four. I tried to look this up and found Coccolithovirus listed as a genus under family Phycodnaviridae, but here on wikipedia Coccolithoviridae is a family.
Could someone who knows this field check this and either change "four" to "five", or trim the list, or reword things to remove the word "four", or something? Thanks. Atomota 04:29, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
Iv looked it up, coccolithoviridae should be removed, im new to wikipedia though and dont know how to change the article. can someone change this part? Numzana 23:45, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
From my review of the literature, the genome is indeed Linear but has 900 base pair inverted repeats at each end which would enable it to become circular within a cell. I think this should be mentioned in the Genome section as few viruses in this group really have a linear genome when inside a cell.
thoughts, comments? Numzana 00:16, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
The speculation about this virus as an "intermediate" or even a precursor to life depends on the idea that this virus represents some stripped-down or prototype version of a bacterium or the like. However, you could draw multiple scenarios of the evolution:
By intuition I favor the second model, but the point is, you don't know where you are until you know where you came from. Existing evidence is: [1] Mimiviruses have a special promoter for their own genes, which supposedly makes them something ancient and unique - but promoter sequences are easy to evolve and the virus has a strong pecuniary interest in keeping its resources private. [2] I haven't accessed this, but I infer from the search blurb that the viruses fall out in their own family somewhere among the eukaryotes. Deep taxonomy often includes publications of believable-looking trees that are later disputed, but if it really did come from eukaryotic sequence - perhaps its host organism - then it is not some tiny primitive bacterium-like thing.
The bottom line is that any speculation about the nature of this organism should be subordinate to sourced information about its evolution. Wnt ( talk) 14:58, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
An article on Discovery News states that a larger virus has been discovered and dubbed 'mamavirus'. I can't find much on it but can anyone confirm this from a good source? Rob.desbois ( talk) 08:15, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
yea mamavirus is larger. A good source —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.122.203.62 ( talk) 17:32, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
The intro should now be corrected as the mimivirus is no longer the largest virus. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.167.194.114 ( talk) 21:06, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
According to the new version of the page with megavirus as new biggest virus shouldn't it be now third biggest one? also under genome-part it is still mentioned as biggest one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.172.94.30 ( talk) 11:16, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
Sorry if I am not going about this the right way but I have heard (and read) that a very small virus has been found associated with mimivirus. I was wondering if anyone else thought that this would be a pertinent addition to the article? Again sorry if I am miss-using the talk page source: Bernard La Scola et al (2008) Nature, 455, 100-104
Of interest from July-August 2011, Volume 99, Number 4, page: 304, DOI: 10.1511/2011.91.304 American Scientist: Giant Viruses: The recent discovery of really, really big viruses is changing views about the nature of viruses and the history of life by James L. Van Etten? It contains a Bibliography, and is the Feature Article cover story. 99.181.142.15 ( talk) 04:42, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
The section on Implications for defining "life" contains this sentence: ~Some genes unique to Mimivirus, including those coding for the capsid, have been conserved in a variety of viruses which infect organisms from all domains." This seems self-contradictory: if the genes are unique to Mimivirus, that means they aren't found in anything else, right? Then how can they have been conserved in a variety of other viruses? Steorra ( talk) 19:01, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
This is interesting:
http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-like-immune-system-discovered-in-giant-virus-1.19462
Maybe someone could add a summary to the article. I don't have the knowledge to do this properly myself. 173.228.123.101 ( talk) 01:20, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 2 external links on Mimivirus. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 08:29, 12 December 2017 (UTC)
Does anyone know where this comes from? The ICTV page I've seen [3] seems to state only Megavirus chilensis but might be out of date. (I find their webpages hard to navigate.) Espresso Addict ( talk) 05:18, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
![]() | Mimivirus was one of the Natural sciences good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
Current status: Delisted good article |
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
xyz1323: How can a "Mimivirus" live? It's a living organism, like any other virii. Did you sleep through biology class or something? -Alex 12.220.157.93 06:43, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
And then of course, there is the debate over whether or not (some?) viruses form a fourth domain of life. Grigory Deepdelver AKA Arch O. La Talk TCF 22:56, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
Nothing can live "independently". You'd die if you were dumped in a vacuum (and you wouldn't reproduce there, either). Even those autotrophs which can live completely without relying on other organisms (note: this group in particular already excludes all members of the animal kingdom... even though the word "animal" literally means "something which is alive") still need particular materials from the Earth's ground and atmosphere, and in some cases sunlight. For a species to live, it must have a suitable environment containing certain necessary features - and for virusses, one of these features just happens to be the presence of cellular life forms. -- Milo
Yes. The current human definition of "life" is nomothetic. Along the way it has been influenced by cell theory, etc. Facts are that until sentients discover any life that is not a collector and conduit, of/from a material or an energy source, all life must be considered somehow dependent.
Even "non-living" minerals come as elements created by stellar processes, and interactions dependent on the presence of other substances, even of the same general kind.
To advance the discussion, would suggest defining life more simply until a better way can be found:
How about that organisms are matter that can reproduce similar forms, transform over generations/evolve, are based on (or are themselves bits of) a code (DNA/RNA, etc.) and affect their environment whatever that is.
That might suffice at least until some beings manifest that do not fit this formulation. -- Ala Balsam Collestan — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.124.165.189 ( talk) 23:50, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
I think this page needs updating and some clarification of the "facts". From reading around the current given number of genes for Mimi is 911 (protein coding); with some news-sites quoting ~900, which is possibly where the original value came from at the top of the article. The common value given for number of base pairs is ~1.2Mbp 1,200,000 not 800,000. The language used in the wiki article suggests “bases” not base pairs; since the virus has double stranded DNA this is a little confusing?!
It might be nice to include a few speculative Mimi topics: the possibility of human infection, evolved to look like tasty bacteria to get amoeba actively hunting it...
http://www.virologyj.com/content/2/1/62
The NewScientist mag has recently written an article about Mimi, so its likely there will be more traffic to this page. It would be great if it wasn't just a bunch of links to sources. This article hasn't developed much since I came here a few months ago! I guess I could add some stuff if no one else is bothered :S ~~
Matt Oates 21:34, 25 March 2006 (GMT)
Whoa! Just came back to this page since I noticed a minor edit on my watch-list! Nice job Serephine, thanks :] I've nominated the article for GA status. MattOates (Ulti) 12:30, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
The article states:
Because its lineage is very old and could have emerged prior to cellular organisms, mimivirus[...]
Since virusses rely on cellular organisms for reproduction, and this trait seems to be integral to what a virus is, how could any virus possibly have existed before cellular organisms came around? -- Milo
Im a Microbiology student about to graduate, currently studying virology. From my understanding, there is a lot of debate within the scientific community about early primordial evolution of life from simple molecules and viruses are showing more and more prominence in the current theorys. Geneticly, Mimivirus diverged earlier than eukaryotic cells, because of its gene content and how that relates to euykaryotic genes. However, what we think of as a cell was thought to be very different at this primordial point, more like membrane bags that viruses popped in and out of while shuffling around their genes with each other. It is from this that different viruses emerged and then when cells as we know them emerged, the viruses modified themselves to infect them. Its much, much more complicated than that and there are a bunch of conflicting and interfering ideas on the subject. suffice to say that it was all a bit of a mess back then and what the sentence "Because its lineage is very old and could have emerged prior to cellular organisms" means is that the genetic content diverged largely as it is seen today earlier than the cellular lifeforms that we see today. It's complicated I know, heres an article that serves as a good starting point for the topic: -Evolution of complexity in the viral world: the dawn of a new vision. Koonin EV, Dolja VV. Virus Research volume 117 issue 1 page 1-4 Feb 2006-
Hope this helps, Numzana 23:28, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
Viruses have much simpler structure than cells. Viroids (RNA molecule with just 240 to 600 nucleotides or 10,000 atoms)have even simpler structures. Hence it seems reasonable that viruses and viroids were the first to emerge in evolution. At that time, there would be no cells, and these "creatures" would be just replicating using the available enzyme molecules in the primordial soup. Today, viruses can also be replicated biochemically without cells. Leslie Orgel conducted experiments where RNA nucleotides join to produce RNA, which later self-replicate. Spieglemen used protein enzymes Q-beta replicase to help Q-beta viral RNA replicate in test tubes and artificially selects virus RNAs to drive chemical evolution. DNA can be replicated using polymerase chain reaction (PCR). I hold the gene-centric rather than cell-centric view of life where cells are not necessary. The mimivirus you mentioned could well be a missing link of the evolution from viruses to cells, and not the other way round. It is easy to say that viruses are just "drop-outs" from cells, but it is important to ask: Where does the complex cellular structures with all its myriads of organelles like nucleus, ribosomes etc come from? As far as we know, the early days of earth was so hot that cellular structures couldn't have existed.
These early self-replicating processes are the viruses. They later got encapsulated by the bilipd layer to form cells. Hence viruses appear before cells.
I'd like to see the "notes" and "references" sections combined, so that they are all in-lined references. Otherwise I think it looks Good. Pete.Hurd 19:01, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
I'd like references for statements in the lead section, add links to "pneumonia", the reference "(M. Suzan-Monti, 2006)" at the end of the first paragraph of the "Replication" section should be in-lined. I think the section "Implications for life" could have a better title, maybe including the phrase --definition of "life"-- but I can't come up with one that I'm happy with... Pete.Hurd 19:38, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
The article says "nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses (NCLDV), which includes four other families: Poxviridae, Iridoviridae, Phycodnaviridae, Asfarviridae and Coccolithoviridae." That is five families, not four. I tried to look this up and found Coccolithovirus listed as a genus under family Phycodnaviridae, but here on wikipedia Coccolithoviridae is a family.
Could someone who knows this field check this and either change "four" to "five", or trim the list, or reword things to remove the word "four", or something? Thanks. Atomota 04:29, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
Iv looked it up, coccolithoviridae should be removed, im new to wikipedia though and dont know how to change the article. can someone change this part? Numzana 23:45, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
From my review of the literature, the genome is indeed Linear but has 900 base pair inverted repeats at each end which would enable it to become circular within a cell. I think this should be mentioned in the Genome section as few viruses in this group really have a linear genome when inside a cell.
thoughts, comments? Numzana 00:16, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
The speculation about this virus as an "intermediate" or even a precursor to life depends on the idea that this virus represents some stripped-down or prototype version of a bacterium or the like. However, you could draw multiple scenarios of the evolution:
By intuition I favor the second model, but the point is, you don't know where you are until you know where you came from. Existing evidence is: [1] Mimiviruses have a special promoter for their own genes, which supposedly makes them something ancient and unique - but promoter sequences are easy to evolve and the virus has a strong pecuniary interest in keeping its resources private. [2] I haven't accessed this, but I infer from the search blurb that the viruses fall out in their own family somewhere among the eukaryotes. Deep taxonomy often includes publications of believable-looking trees that are later disputed, but if it really did come from eukaryotic sequence - perhaps its host organism - then it is not some tiny primitive bacterium-like thing.
The bottom line is that any speculation about the nature of this organism should be subordinate to sourced information about its evolution. Wnt ( talk) 14:58, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
An article on Discovery News states that a larger virus has been discovered and dubbed 'mamavirus'. I can't find much on it but can anyone confirm this from a good source? Rob.desbois ( talk) 08:15, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
yea mamavirus is larger. A good source —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.122.203.62 ( talk) 17:32, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
The intro should now be corrected as the mimivirus is no longer the largest virus. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.167.194.114 ( talk) 21:06, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
According to the new version of the page with megavirus as new biggest virus shouldn't it be now third biggest one? also under genome-part it is still mentioned as biggest one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.172.94.30 ( talk) 11:16, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
Sorry if I am not going about this the right way but I have heard (and read) that a very small virus has been found associated with mimivirus. I was wondering if anyone else thought that this would be a pertinent addition to the article? Again sorry if I am miss-using the talk page source: Bernard La Scola et al (2008) Nature, 455, 100-104
Of interest from July-August 2011, Volume 99, Number 4, page: 304, DOI: 10.1511/2011.91.304 American Scientist: Giant Viruses: The recent discovery of really, really big viruses is changing views about the nature of viruses and the history of life by James L. Van Etten? It contains a Bibliography, and is the Feature Article cover story. 99.181.142.15 ( talk) 04:42, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
The section on Implications for defining "life" contains this sentence: ~Some genes unique to Mimivirus, including those coding for the capsid, have been conserved in a variety of viruses which infect organisms from all domains." This seems self-contradictory: if the genes are unique to Mimivirus, that means they aren't found in anything else, right? Then how can they have been conserved in a variety of other viruses? Steorra ( talk) 19:01, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
This is interesting:
http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-like-immune-system-discovered-in-giant-virus-1.19462
Maybe someone could add a summary to the article. I don't have the knowledge to do this properly myself. 173.228.123.101 ( talk) 01:20, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 2 external links on Mimivirus. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 08:29, 12 December 2017 (UTC)
Does anyone know where this comes from? The ICTV page I've seen [3] seems to state only Megavirus chilensis but might be out of date. (I find their webpages hard to navigate.) Espresso Addict ( talk) 05:18, 3 February 2020 (UTC)