Mind-blowing Discoveries About Viruses and Their Relationship With Us

so in this video I wanted to explore the absolutely insane world of viruses but not the types of viruses we usually get scared about not the types of viruses that normally cause pandemics we're actually going to be discussing viruses or discoveries about viruses that are somewhat surprising and will hopefully help you see these very mysterious organisms in a very different light because despite being relatively simple and obviously being the tiniest organisms on the entire plan planet with some scientists even suggesting that they're technically not even life and instead represent something entirely different in reality all life on planet Earth has a really complex relationship with viruses of all sorts and it's not always negative as a matter of fact it's usually kind of positive one of the older videos in the description even talks about how technically you and I are approximately 8% virus in terms of DNA contents with these strange organisms also technically responsible for human human reproduction you can learn more about this in the description but in this video we're going to discuss some of the other very unusual discoveries from the last few months focusing on things we really didn't know about or things that surprised everyone and so h on full person this is Anton let's discuss viruses and their interaction with various life on the planet once again focusing on several topics such as viruses that seem to protect us viruses with some really extreme morphology and shape various types of giant viruses that are even more complex than certain bacteria and a few viruses inside of us that potentially act like vitamins as in they literally make us grow stronger just through sheer interaction with certain cells and well let's start with one of the more unusual discoveries from the last few months so there's this type of a virus that's mostly responsible for infecting various plants known as poty virus these are usually responsible for harming plants such as for example various cabbages broccoli cauliflowers and even potatoes often making them turn somewhat black and naturally eventually causing their demise or so the scientists thought at first but one of the recent studies you can find in the description surprisingly discovered something entirely different when some of these plants experience very tough conditions such as for example drought during drought or other conditions when plants experience a lot of stress it was discovered that some of these viruses actually switch from killing the plant to suddenly helping it and it did so by switching off certain genes and preventing the plant from losing water while also affecting its circadian clock or the way it responds to light and so plants infected with this virus had a much higher chance up to about 25% to survive the drought in other words some of the viruses inside these plants dramatically increase the survival rate just by changing certain genes they even increase the amount of production of various antioxidants boosting the health of the plant in the process which is a super important Discovery because it implies that environmental conditions dramatically change the effects of viruses on plants and possibly even animal life helping them switch from being a pathogen to actually being helpful and obviously because planet Earth might experience more drought in the future this is a super important Discovery although interestingly this mostly had an effect on wild plants and not so much effect on various cultivated plants or the ones usually used in farming implying of course that the viral coevolution is super important for survival of various species so basically by Sheltering a plant from viruses and protecting them we're sort of making them much weaker and a lot less likely to survive any potential environmental disaster but you and I are not vegetables we're not cabbages so does this actually apply to us as well well at the moment it doesn't look that way but something else was discovered in regards to mammals or I guess humans as well and here this is mostly in regards to what's known as bacterio fages and extremely important type of a virus that only infects and replicates inside bacteria representing some of the most common and most diverse entities on the entire planet as a matter of fact there are most likely more bacterial fases on Earth than anything else for example in the oceans they seem to be the most prominent organisms as a matter of fact they can also technically be used as antibiotics because they only attack bacteria and nothing else here's for example a beautiful electron micrograph of several bacteria fages attacking a bacteria and as you probably aware we do have lots of bacteria inside of us as well technically more bacterial cells than your physical body cells and so technically it would not be incorrect to assume that we're basically real estate for various bacteria lots of them tend to live inside and outside of us and thrive in different conditions in our bodies but it just so happens that in our stomachs and inside human gut millions and millions years of evolution resulted in a very strange relationship between these unusual viruses and mamalian cells now inside of you right now there are probably at least a thousand trillion figures inside your Gat or basically a quadrillion of these unusual viruses and they're mostly preoccupied trying to attack the bacteria that's living inside there as well but this new study that just came out a few weeks ago discovered something nobody expected these unusual T4 bacterial fages can sometimes be also internalized by mamalian cells as well accumulating inside certain structures known as macropinosomes but instead of causing the mamalian cell to explode or to be infected it does something entirely different they actually seem to dramatically increase cell metabolism reorganizing the cell making it stronger and even regulating a lot of positive feedback loops literally acting as a typical vitamin they make our cells grow stronger and become more resilient and so for reasons that we still don't understand instead of being infected by these viruses our cells seem to accept bacteria phases and use them as an important resource promoting growth and Metabolism which at the moment is very difficult to understand but that's exactly what this paper discovers it's basically once again a result of coevolution for millions and millions of years which somehow resulted in ourselves learning how to use these bacterial fages and as I mentioned there are quite a lot of them inside of us to make ourselves much stronger and much more resilient which of course implies that bacterial phase therapy that's been used for hundreds of years might be a really important source for human health and so these are some really important positive discoveries but when it comes to bacteria figes because of the sheer numbers of these anural viruses things get complex really quickly for example even though in a typical textbook this is kind of what the bacterial is usually depicted as quite a lot of bacterial fages use other strategies and other shapes to try to enter the cell for example right here you're actually looking at something that has a very long t tail because in this case some bacterial Fes have a very large compartment and a tail attached to a spiky protein that usually contains their DNA and though normally these tailes differ a little bit in terms of length and style recently the scientist discovered something super strange they refer to this as a Rapunzel bacterio bacterio whose stale is at least 10 times longer than usual up to 1 micrometer in length and so because of this long tail it's now known as the Rapunzel bacteria of Ag and obviously serves only one purpose to puncture the bacteria and to try to enter inside the cell in order to then inject all of the RNA or DNA but why exactly is the tail so long well normally a lot of bacteria will actually contain a kind of a viscous substance around them in order to protect themselves from various viruses and so once again through Co Evolution they evolved longer and longer Tales because I guess some bacteria were just getting a little bit slimy moreover it looks like these types of viruses and these types of bacteria seem to mostly reside inside Hot Springs so these are some of the toughest bacteria on the planet making these viruses also super super tough in this case Rapunzel virus seem to actually survive very hot temperatures for a very long time potentially making this one of the most resilient viruses out there but exactly how it's able to survive so long is currently unknown but some viruses adapted in different ways actually not all viruses are technically bad for us as I mentioned a lot of them Co to help us quite a lot and normally in a typical textbook a typical viral infection looks something like this basically you have a virus attached to the cell it then sort of hijacks the Machinery inside the cell to produce more and more copies which then leads to the major release of viruses in a process this is of course extremely simplified and quite a lot of viruses out there found even easier and better strategies as a matter of fact some viruses evolve to not make anyone sick and not infect cells at all and instead just enter the cell and kind of wait for things to happen and the reason this evolved is once again visible in this picture there's a lot of competition out there sometimes viruses are competing for the same cell so what do you actually do if there's a virus inside the cell already and the Machinery from the cell is already being used well certain bacterial phages evolved something else entirely they evolved a concept known as viral satellites and the way all of this works is even more intriguing some of these viruses will enter the cell and then some how find a way to stay dormant sometimes they'll even integrate inside the chromosome inserting their own genes inside but they do this for one simple purpose they're waiting for someone else they're actually waiting for another virus to come into the cell in order to then hijack all the Machinery that the virus was going to use to start replicating inside the cell blocking the other virus and interestingly a lot of bacteria out there seem to have a huge number of these satellite helper systems inside of their genes already in some sense constantly competing for the use of bacterial machinery and evolving new ways to continuously exploit each other as a matter of fact the famous genetic modification tool known as crisper the tool that we now use for genetic modification is very likely the result of this unusual relationship and Once Upon a Time was one of these satellite viruses but interestingly some bacterial fages found an even more unusual way to compete or I guess to some extent a much lazier way instead of entering the cell and stay dormant they literally do this this is an image of one of these bacterio fages attached to the one with a much longer tail and so this is the first ever satellite that seems to actually not stay inside the cell but instead evolved a very short appendage to grab onto the neck of another virus and then hijack the Machinery inside the cell once the bacteria Fage attaches to the cell here the larger virus is referred to as the mine flare and a smaller virus is now called mini flare and so they have a very unusual almost like a vampire relationship where the larger virus once it finds a cell is going to find itself very disappointed when not only does it have to carry someone around itself it also doesn't get to reproduce because the satellite virus is going to take over and reproduce instead and so in some sense this is actually a virus of a virus and as you can probably imagine trying to understand how these virus viruses work and how to maybe use them to protect ourselves from actual pathogens would be super important for future study now currently this is only for bacteria and bacterio fages but it's quite likely something similar exists in a lot of other viruses we tend to think of as dangerous so definitely a pretty cool vampire virus but not the strangest virus out there because some of the strangest viruses are probably giant viruses viruses that are normally at least 10 times bigger than a normal smaller virus and that will often contain a lot of genes and in some of the recent studies some of the researchers were actually kind of surprised to discover that a lot of these giant viruses contain genes associated with metabolism suggesting that they infect cells and then use them as a kind of a massive energy Factory for reasons still not really understood but all of these giant viruses are normally found in the ocean and one of the stranger viruses discovered in the ocean recently is what's known as Medusa virus a virus whose replication process and whose genome seem to be so different from anything else as a matter of fact the way it reproduces seems to be actually similar to much more complex eukariotic cells here's actually a picture of some of these giant viruses inside a typical amoeba and so unlike other viruses these viruses tend to produce completely separate parts by using several different genes inside of them releasing a variety of different particles to the outside of the cell which then have to recombine into an actual Medusa virus in other words inside the cell they tend to produce individual Lego blocks which are then released to the outside and have to recombine to recreate new virus this is extremely different from anything else and involves a lot of complexity we've never seen before in this case they actually produce four separate types of particles which were then found outside of the cell and which then when connecting to each other once again recreate a new Medusa virus and actually one of the reasons this virus is called Medusa virus is because it does something very unique to various types of amoeba After The Infection these amoeba Harden forming a hard Stone WX structure at first first and then exploding afterwards I guess borrowing from the Greek mythology and from the infamous Medusa on top of this scientists also discovered ridiculously complex giant viruses nobody thought were possible here we're talking about the actual genome and the amount of proteins on the inside to date the largest discovered so far contains over 700,000 base pairs or essentially representing genome that's about 15 times larger than usual it's actually even larger than certain bacteria and so these types of of giant viruses evolutionary speaking May finally bridge the gap between bacteria and viral organisms these huge fages were only discovered relatively recently so it's not entirely clear how they evolved just yet but they're definitely one of the more intriguing discoveries and it's also not clear what most of their genes do but it's a very surprising and a very intriguing Discovery I'm sure we'll find out more once there is more analysis and once there are more studies and then there was a discovery of this Yara virus another Giant virus but in this case unusual for a different reason when the researchers sequenced its DNA they actually discovered that only six genes in the DNA were known to us with about 70 proteins never seen before anywhere in any life making Yara virus essentially the least known virus to us containing genes nobody has ever seen before in any type of an organism and this is not to show you that this is some kind of an alien organism from another planet instead is to show you that there is just a a huge amount of Life out there we still haven't discovered and haven't analyzed life that possesses lineage no biologist has ever explored and this y virus reminds us of that it reminds us that Modern Biology is still in its infancy there's still so much stuff out there that we haven't found here's another picture of this virus in this case attacking an amoeba but the thing is we might be discovering more and more viruses for I guess one simple reason and this is a More unnerving Concept known as the zombie vir viruses a lot of ancient viruses that might have been buried in for example permafrost are now slowly coming to the surface as the temperature in the Arctic is changing weakening some of the layers in the Perma Frost and naturally some of this permafrost contains ancient viruses that might have infected ancient life or not even that ancient we're talking about life from just a few thousand years ago and though it might sound like some kind of a doom and glom and maybe something we shouldn't be worrying about there was a case in 2016 that made made us worry you can read about this in one of the studies in a description but in essence in 2016 a bunch of reindeer greasing in parts of Siberia specifically in the location you see right here managed to catch antrax when some of the ancient spores from basilis and tris resurfaced during one of the hotter Summers very likely coming from some kind of a old animal carcass that the reindeer approached and so approximately 2,000 reindeer and several dozen humans were infected by Anthrax as a result of this luckily this was contained pretty quickly but this definitely made everyone worry and so in the last year some scientists were actually trying to figure out okay let just say it happens with a different virus would it still be infectious and would it have a potential to maybe become super dangerous specifically if this virus is like thousands of years old and so several scientists from several different teams in the last decade or so performed various experiments trying to revive various bacteria fages discovered in Pera Frost and so far they've been able to successfully revive all of them even viruses as old as 50,000 years old suggesting that these ancient viruses are still quite active and can still infect a lot of different cells Even after spending thousands of years inside eyes and so at this point we can only hope that no dangerous super deadly virus is hiding in some of the size and though this kind of sounds a little bit scary and maybe a little bit unnerving especially with a name like zombie virus at this point we just have to be really careful but we don't really know if this applies to more complex viruses especially because most of this so far has only been done with simple bacteria phases so we don't really know if this applies to everything but we might find out one day and I guess last but maybe not least we also once again discover that space travel is not so good for us turns out that when you live in space a lot of dormant viruses such as the herpes virus tend to reawaken as a matter of fact as the study discovered most astronauts infected with the herpes virus had herpes reactivate in space and this is also probably true of other viruses hiding inside our bodies which once again means that we're probably not really meant to live in space and we probably should consider taking care of planet Earth just a little bit better oh wait one more interesting Discovery turns out that because there are so many viruses in the oceans certain animals discovered the way to actually eat them and that includes organisms like crabs different types of anemones and more interestingly sponges apparently a typical sponge can easily kill 98% of viruses by eating them directly I'm not sure what we're going to do with this information just yet but cool sponges eat viruses so yeah lots and lots of intriguing new discoveries about viruses that we basically never knew about up until a few months ago but as with previous studies this is just the first step we'll come back and talk more about this in some of the future videos until then thank you for watching subscribe check out previous videos on the similar Topic in the description below support this channel patreon by join Channel membership or by Buy in the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always [Music] [Music] bye-bye

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 472,183

Keywords: halteria, chlorovirus, anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, space engine, universe sandbox 2, virus, viruses, does anything eat viruses, what eats viruses, eating viruses, consuming viruses, virus consumption, picozoa, single cell organism, choanozoa, organisms that eat viruses, food cycle, plankton, food chain, viral shunt, why don't viruses destroy everything, viral, viral infection

Id: 3x78ip5xhOA

Length: 20min 47sec (1247 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024