Scientists Discover 1st Organism That Feeds On Viruses

Name a type of organic matter and chances are some type of organism has evolved to eat it. Plants, meat, algae, insects and bacteria are all consumed by different creatures, but now scientists have discovered something new on the menu – viruses, Michael Irving reported for New Atlas.

Photo Insert: These experiments show that the newly coined term “virovory” can now take its place among herbivory, carnivory et al, with Halteria crowned the first known virovore.

Researcher John DeLong at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln wanted to find out if any microbes ate viruses, and whether such a diet could support the growth of their community.

“They’re made up of really good stuff: nucleic acids, a lot of nitrogen and phosphorous,” said DeLong. “Everything should want to eat them. So many things will eat anything they can get a hold of. Surely something would have learned how to eat these really good raw materials.”

To test the hypothesis, DeLong and his team collected samples of pond water, isolated different microbes, and then added large amounts of chlorovirus, which infects green algae.

The team tracked the population size of the viruses and the other microbes to see if the latter was eating the former. One microbe seemed to be snacking on the viruses – a ciliate known as Halteria.

In water samples with no other food source for the ciliates, Halteria populations grew by about 15 times within two days, while chlorovirus levels dropped 100-fold.

In control samples without the virus, Halteria didn’t grow at all.

In follow-up tests, the team tagged chlorovirus DNA with fluorescent dye, and found that Halteria cells soon began to glow. This helped confirm that Halteria was indeed consuming the virus.

These experiments show that the newly coined term “virovory” can now take its place among herbivory, carnivory et al, with Halteria crowned the first known virovore.

This discovery could have huge pharmaceutical impact, as these microbes could be utilized to develop anti-viral drugs to wipe out COVID-19 viruses and others that cause deadly diseases.

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