ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Thirty-thousand-year-old distant relative of giant icosahedral DNA viruses with a pandoravirus morphology.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 248 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
248 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Nature Exposure and Its Effects on Immune System Functioning: A Systematic Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Pooled it
- Infection cycles of viruses of the phylum Nucleocytoviricota.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Why did some viruses evolve to be giants while others did not?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Hydrothermal regimes regulate microbiome patterns across vertical profile and their responses to alpine permafrost degradation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Giant viruses of the polar regions: diversity, endemism, adaptation and ecological structuring.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2026Review
- Elucidating the protein interaction network of one of the largest icosahedral capsids in the virosphere.The EMBO journal · 2026Article
- Reassessing viral origins and evolutionary placement in the tree of life.Antonie van Leeuwenhoek · 2026Review
- Strain-level diversity of giant viruses infecting chlorarachniophyte algae in the subtropical North Pacific.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- From sequencing to understanding: a grand challenge in genome-scale molecular and genetic analysis.Frontiers in plant science · 2026Article
- Genome-wide Characterization of Non-shared Sequences among Amphora-shaped Giant Viruses.Microbes and environments · 2026Article
- The proteomics of the giant cedratvirus particles reveals unique and shared features with pitho-like viruses.Journal of virology · 2025Article
- Reassessing Viral Origins: From Escaped Genes to Degenerated Microbes.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Evolutionarily conserved grammar rules viral factories of amoeba-infecting members of the hyperdiverseProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Summary of taxonomy changes ratified by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) from the Fungal and Protist Viruses Subcommittee, 2025.The Journal of general virology · 2025Article
- Ultrastructural and transcriptional changes during a giant virus infection of a green alga.Npj viruses · 2025Article
- Twelfth scientific biennial meeting of the Australasian Virology Society: AVS12 2024.Journal of virology · 2025Article
- Refining the taxonomy of pithovirus-related giant DNA viruses within the order Pimascovirales.Archives of virology · 2025Article
- Reviving the past for a healthier future: ancient molecules and remedies as a solution to the antibiotic crisis.Future microbiology · 2025Review
- The final cut: how giant viruses of protists are released from their hosts' cells.Archives of virology · 2025Review
- Investigations into the Diversity and Distribution of tRNA and Phylogenetics of Translation Factors in Amoebozoa-InfectingViruses · 2025Article
188 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
14 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The largest known DNA viruses infect Acanthamoeba and belong to two markedly different families. The Megaviridae exhibit pseudo-icosahedral virions up to 0.7 μm in diameter and adenine-thymine (AT)-rich genomes of up to 1.25 Mb encoding a thousand proteins. Like their Mimivirus prototype discovered 10 y ago, they entirely replicate within cytoplasmic virion factories. In contrast, the recently discovered Pandoraviruses exhibit larger amphora-shaped virions 1 μm in length and guanine-cytosine-rich genomes up to 2.8 Mb long encoding up to 2,500 proteins. Their replication involves the host nucleus. Whereas the Megaviridae share some general features with the previously described icosahedral large DNA viruses, the Pandoraviruses appear unrelated to them. Here we report the discovery of a third type of giant virus combining an even larger pandoravirus-like particle 1.5 μm in length with a surprisingly smaller 600 kb AT-rich genome, a gene content more similar to Iridoviruses and Marseillevirus, and a fully cytoplasmic replication reminiscent of the Megaviridae. This suggests that pandoravirus-like particles may be associated with a variety of virus families more diverse than previously envisioned. This giant virus, named Pithovirus sibericum, was isolated from a >30,000-y-old radiocarbon-dated sample when we initiated a survey of the virome of Siberian permafrost. The revival of such an ancestral amoeba-infecting virus used as a safe indicator of the possible presence of pathogenic DNA viruses, suggests that the thawing of permafrost either from global warming or industrial exploitation of circumpolar regions might not be exempt from future threats to human or animal health.
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