Talk:Mimivirus

message: 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)
:JstInterested: This page obviously needs updating-- and somone willing to clean it up and update it.  If somone is interested, I'm sure no one will stop them.
::Oh I'll be flexing my little keyboard muscles here soon enough, don't you worry -- Serephine ♠ talk - 12:40, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Update complete! -- Serephine ♠ talk - 19:37, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: On second thought from looking at the history thanks to all the people who edited :] since it's quite a few! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by MattOates (talk • contribs) 12:33, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Update

message: 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
:Unless I'm mistaken, aren't there some viruses capable of self-assembly?
:To allow myself the luxury of speculation, perhaps after billions of years of evolution, obligate parasitism simply works better for the majority of viruses. Indeed, considering mimivirus itself was originally mistaken for a bacterium, maybe there are viruses out there that we simply don't know about, because we haven't looked for them... --Xanthine 17:52, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem, however, is that the viral capsule is inherantly incapable of division: it has to be built from the outside, therefore absolutely necessitating a host that can express the viral proteins. In short, a solid virus, even if it had a metabolism, cannot make another virus. The whole idea, therefore, of "self assembly" is meaningless, because one virus cannot come from another. It is far, far more likely that viruses are the descendents of cellular processes. The whole section we have devoted to this idea is almost entirely speculation. Can somebody add some citations to it? – ClockworkSoul 06:08, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Valid points. All in all, it's an interesting topic for discussion. A friend of mine is a doctor, and I know he has some papers on Mimivirus. I'll see if I can get him to take a look at this page... --Xanthine 13:37, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Hmm... From what I've read, there's a number of theories revolving around Mimivirus. On of which, as Numzana mentioned, is that viruses diverged from prokaryotes shortly before the evolution of eukaryotes and evolved to lose their ribosomes and parasitize other organisms.  Another theory maintains that Mimivirus is an anomaly created through horizontal gene transfer between a normal virus, its amoeba host, parasitic prokaryotes within the amoeba, and the "Sputnik" virophage and that the theory of viruses diverging from prokaryotes is utter poppycock.  As to which, if any, theory is true, no-one knows as of yet.  173.180.72.42 (talk) 22:34, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Which came first?

message: 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)
replies: text: I've dealt with the referencing and renamed the sections. Lead sections don't usually need refs as they should summarise the rest of the article. TimVickers 21:07, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: GA feedback

message: 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)
thread_title:  Are there four other NCLDV families, or five? 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Genome Linear or Circular 

message: 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:
# A free-living organism evolves into an obligate intracellular parasite, then develops a hard viral capsule to protect it.
# A tiny virus begins to acquire additional genes for some reason and gets larger and larger.  (This would hint that there is something unusual about amoeba metabolism that encourages viruses to bring their own toolkit)
# (implied in some discussion above) The virus somehow developed as a primordial free-living organism and is less degraded from that original free state than most
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:  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.  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)
thread_title:  Evolutionary path 

message: === No longer the largest known virus? ===
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)
replies: text: I've added a brief mention. Is the mamavirus a kind of mimivirus, or are they a distinctly different kind of virus? --68.0.124.33 (talk) 15:16, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  According to researchers, Mamavirus is a second, larger strain of APMV, so yes, it is a type of Mimivirus.  Seeing as the Mamavirus page barely contains any information, I suggest that the Mamavirus page be merged into the Mimivirus page. 173.180.72.42 (talk) 22:26, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

text: That would definitely be a pertinent addition to the article. Evenfiel (talk) 16:21, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I've added a brief mention of that smaller virus. But I am a bit confused about what kinds of viruses it infects. Does it only infect the mamavirus, or does it also infect the previously-discovered mimivirus? --68.0.124.33 (talk) 15:16, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  It infects both interchangably.  173.180.72.42 (talk) 22:27, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  mamavirus 

message: 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)
replies: text: I've added a brief mention. Is the mamavirus a kind of mimivirus, or are they a distinctly different kind of virus? --68.0.124.33 (talk) 15:16, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  According to researchers, Mamavirus is a second, larger strain of APMV, so yes, it is a type of Mimivirus.  Seeing as the Mamavirus page barely contains any information, I suggest that the Mamavirus page be merged into the Mimivirus page. 173.180.72.42 (talk) 22:26, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  No longer the largest known virus? 

message: 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
:That would definitely be a pertinent addition to the article. Evenfiel (talk) 16:21, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I've added a brief mention of that smaller virus. But I am a bit confused about what kinds of viruses it infects. Does it only infect the mamavirus, or does it also infect the previously-discovered mimivirus? --68.0.124.33 (talk) 15:16, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  It infects both interchangably.  173.180.72.42 (talk) 22:27, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  mimivirus has its own virus? 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Of interest from [[American Scientist]] 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Self-contradiction (or unclear) 

message: 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)
replies: text: Yes, it is notable. Thanks. BatteryIncluded (talk) 01:38, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  virophage immunity 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Does anyone know where this comes from? The ICTV page I've seen  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)
thread_title:  Source for list of species in infobox