A new life form? Mimivirus -- the Bradford Bug

Forget the tongue-in-cheek articles about the discoveries of a baby Nessie and a Chupacabra (or is it a Thylacine?) -- this is a small, but very weird and potentially highly significant find.

A strange life form has been identified in Bradford.

Genetic analysis reveals that the organism is so bizarre and unlike anything else seen by scientists that perhaps it should be placed in its own category of living things.

The creature, first discovered in a small industrial cooling tower on the outskirts of the city, could qualify for a new "domain" in the tree of life - where a domain is a bigger category than a kingdom or a phylum.

The "giant virus", dubbed the Mimivirus, or "mimicking microbe", because it was first mistaken for a bacterium, inhabits amoebae and is more than twice as big as any other virus so far found. At about half a millionth of a metre across - around the size of a small bacterium - it is one of the few that can be seen under a light microscope.

(... more at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/15/nbug15.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/15/ixhome.html)

As Britney Spears-Federline might say if she was a biologist instead of a pop tart, "Not just a Virus, not quite a Bacillus."

--bkl

tree of life textbooks!

Very interesting!

:-)

given their high reproductive rate, new microbes don't just crawl out of obscure mudpuddles on a regular basis. (It was Sagan, or Gould, or somebody like that)

Why, indeed.