‘Virovore’: Scientists discover an organism that eats viruses

Researchers have found what may be the first-ever “virovore” or an organism which eats viruses. The study was published last week, in the PNAS journal by scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the United States, which found two plankton organisms named Halteria and Paramecium, can not only feed on viruses but also thrive by consuming them.

According to ScienceDirect, there are several other organisms which incidentally consume viruses, to be accounted for in the food chain and be described as virovory, the consumption should contribute a significant amount of energy and nutrients to its consumer which a species of Halteria does.

The research, which has been three years in the making, was looking to find if any microbes actively ate viruses and whether such a diet could support the physiological and population growth of a community which in this case it did.

The microbe in question, Halteria, is a microscopic ciliate that lives in freshwater. “They are made up of really good stuff: nucleic acids, a lot of nitrogen and phosphorous”, said John DeLong, an ecologist from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who with his team made the discovery.

He added, “Everything should want to eat them. So many things will eat anything they can get ahold of. Surely something would have learned how to eat these really good raw materials.” As mentioned earlier, since viruses are omnipresent, they are incidentally eaten all the time, however, for this study, the researchers chose ‘chlorovirus’ which is widespread in freshwater with algae.

Additionally, the research also notes the different patterns of consumption between Halteria and Paramecium as the former used chlorovirus as a source of nutrients and while the latter did consume viruses it did not grow much in population.

Additionally, the consumption of chloroviruses could have a profound impact on the carbon cycle, “If you multiply a crude estimate of how many viruses there are, how many ciliates there are and how much water there is, it comes out to this massive amount of energy movement up the food chain,” said DeLong, reported ScienceDirect.

He added, “If this is happening at the scale that we think it could be, it should completely change our view on global carbon cycling.”

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