wired.com — Made from a hodgepodge of genetic bits and pieces, the newly discovered Marseillevirus is the world?s largest virus. But fame is fleeting: It?s almost sure to be supplanted by another, even bigger virus. What?s really special about Marseillevirus is where it comes from. Like other giant viruses, it was found inside amoebas ? lowly ........
Dec 8, 2009 View in Crawl 4
sludgehammerDec 9, 2009
It's a shame that the image in the article isn't a bit higher res, I can't read how wide the bars in the illustration are.
notsofastenerDec 9, 2009
Well I can't really tell either, but the lower images look to me to have their scale lines labeled as "500 Å". This article (link below) seems to suggest they are in the neighborhood of 500 nm which would be way larger than the roughly 2 nm the scale label would represent (if I am reading it correctly). That would not really be a big virus by any means so I am going to put my money on the second article being correct. And yes it would have been good to have larger images to see the scales properly in the front page article in the first place.<a class="user" href="http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/56208/" rel="nofollow">http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/56208/</a>
daretheninjaDec 9, 2009
i like the evolutionary implications this article poses. i've never thought of phagocytosis in a sense other than that of feeding (the way amoebas use it) or in terms of the human immune system (where white blood cells use it to engulf pathogens). i'd like to see some immunological applications though, where they could help white blood cells do their job better through improved lysozomic function on vacuoles or something like that.