VT Researchers Expand Knowledge of Viral Latency
Researchers in the Aylward lab at Virginia Tech have discovered a dormant virus in a model green alga and were able to reactivate it and get it to produce variants. This expands the known limits of a giant virus’s ability to lay dormant within the genome without being discovered for so long, and this may have greater implications for our understanding of viruses and viral latency.
The researchers in this video have been studying the model green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. A few years ago, they noticed that the genome of one of the isolates had a giant virus integrated into the genome of the algae. The researchers wanted to see if the giant virus could reactivate and form virions, and if it was integrating into the genome of its host, similar to other latent viruses, like HIV or herpes. Most giant viruses, when they infect the host, they wipe out all the cells; they’re highly virulent.