ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Evolution of viruses and cells: do we need a fourth domain of life to explain the origin of eukaryotes?
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- Beyond bacteria: large agents with analogies to Mimiviruses detected in canine cancers: reexamining Gram staining in cancer diagnostics.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- Chimeric origins and dynamic evolution of central carbon metabolism in eukaryotes.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Host-Calibrated Time Tree Caps the Age of Giant Viruses.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Reconstructing the last common ancestor of all eukaryotes.PLoS biology · 2024Review
- Complex Genomes of Early Nucleocytoviruses Revealed by Ancient Origins of Viral Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetases.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Gene Transfer Among Viruses Substantially Contributes to Gene Gain of Giant Viruses.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Viral Prevalence and Genomic Xenology in the Coevolution of HzNV-2 (Nudiviridae) with HostInsects · 2023Article
- Review
- Evolving Perspective on the Origin and Diversification of Cellular Life and the Virosphere.Genome biology and evolution · 2022Review
- RNA Sequencing of Medusavirus Suggests Remodeling of the Host Nuclear Environment at an Early Infection Stage.Microbiology spectrum · 2021Article
- Unraveling gene content variation across eukaryotic giant viruses based on network analyses and host associations.Virus evolution · 2021Article
- Investigating the Concept and Origin of Viruses.Trends in microbiology · 2020Review
- Fibrillarin evolution through the Tree of Life: Comparative genomics and microsynteny network analyses provide new insights into the evolutionary history of Fibrillarin.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Diversification of giant and large eukaryotic dsDNA viruses predated the origin of modern eukaryotes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Diverse plant viruses: a toolbox for dissection of cellular pathways.Journal of experimental botany · 2019Article
- Review
- Taxon Richness of "Megaviridae" Exceeds those of Bacteria and Archaea in the Ocean.Microbes and environments · 2018Article
- Microbial Dark Matter Investigations: How Microbial Studies Transform Biological Knowledge and Empirically Sketch a Logic of Scientific Discovery.Genome biology and evolution · 2018Article
- Classification of Complete Proteomes of Different Organisms and Protein Sets Based on Their Protein Distributions in Terms of Some Key Attributes of Proteins.International journal of genomics · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The recent discovery of diverse very large viruses, such as the mimivirus, has fostered a profusion of hypotheses positing that these viruses define a new domain of life together with the three cellular ones (Archaea, Bacteria and Eucarya). It has also been speculated that they have played a key role in the origin of eukaryotes as donors of important genes or even as the structures at the origin of the nucleus. Thanks to the increasing availability of genome sequences for these giant viruses, those hypotheses are amenable to testing via comparative genomic and phylogenetic analyses. This task is made very difficult by the high evolutionary rate of viruses, which induces phylogenetic artefacts, such as long branch attraction, when inadequate methods are applied. It can be demonstrated that phylogenetic trees supporting viruses as a fourth domain of life are artefactual. In most cases, the presence of homologues of cellular genes in viruses is best explained by recurrent horizontal gene transfer from cellular hosts to their infecting viruses and not the opposite. Today, there is no solid evidence for the existence of a viral domain of life or for a significant implication of viruses in the origin of the cellular domains.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.