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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

When I was an academic working in the bacterial virus (phage) field my lab used to find these viruses with no similarity to anything in the databases all the time. We would find virus after virus that had a totally unique genome. The only way we could identify the genes that encoded the structural proteins was to extract the virus proteins from purified viruses and get them mass speced.

The really amazing thing is if you looked at these viruses under an electron microscope they looked exactly like known viruses (most looked like a lambda phage [1]). There seems to almost an infinite number of ways of making viruses that look just like lambda.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_phage

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The more I think about this, the more distressing this gets. I'd love to hear a little more about this.

Does this mean lambda phage form is some sort of biology's equivalent (or as close as it gets) of a universal constant, or rather — was the genes that encode the 'container' (apologies for my lack of correct terminology here) the same, and the viral payload different, or is it also the case that the 'container code' is also unique between these viruses?

>Does this mean lambda phage form is some sort of biology's equivalent (or as close as it gets) of a universal constant

Maybe this is somewhat true for bacterial viruses, but it's worth noting it's not universally true for phages. eg see [0]. And I can't think of any mammalian viruses that are lambda phage style lunar landers. Sometimes, virses are cyclinders [1] or some kind of roughly spherical geometric structure [2], although some are just kinda blob shaped [3] enveloped viruses (some viruses have an envelope-capsid-envelope structure).

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_X_174 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_mosaic_virus 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimivirus 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza

Yes I think the “lambda” form is close to the most efficient structure that bacterial virus can take. The really interesting question is if this common form is a case of convergent evolution, or if the lack of similarity between all the viral genomes is due to the ancient origins of this virus.

One thing is certain and that is that we have barely scratched the surface of genetic diversity on this planet.

Not to mention the entire T-series of virii.

I don't doubt it. I would be willing to bet that that (unranked category) of "life" is one of the least cataloged. Plus, consider the variance in speed of lateral transfer and mutation.

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