Scientists Discover Organism That Blurs Line Between Life And Non-Life

Researchers have discovered a strange organism that defies traditional definitions of life—Sukunaarchaeum mirabile—which straddles the boundary between a virus and a cell, Darren Orf reported for Popular Mechanics.

Sukunaarchaeum possesses enough genetic machinery to support some cellular functions independently, blurring the line between the living and non-living. I Image: Takuro Nakayama/University of Tsukuba

Found by researchers in Canada and Japan, the organism has a genome of only 238,000 base pairs, making it the smallest known archaeal genome, yet it can produce ribosomes and messenger RNA—biological machinery that viruses lack.

Like viruses, Sukunaarchaeum relies on a host to perform many essential life functions. But unlike typical viruses, it possesses enough genetic machinery to support some cellular functions independently, blurring the line between the living and non-living.

Published on the bioRxiv preprint server, the discovery could reshape how scientists define life, challenging the long-standing exclusion of viruses from the tree of life and adding to a small, curious category of quasi-living entities.