'Obelisks': Entirely New Class of Life Has Been Found in The Human Digestive System
Peering into the jungle of microbes that live within us, researchers have stumbled across what seem to be an entire new class of virus-like objects.
"It's insane," says University of North Carolina cell biologist Mark Peifer, who was not involved in the study, told Elizabeth Pennisi at Science Magazine. "The more we look, the more crazy things we see."
These mysterious bits of genetic material have no detectable sequences or even structural similarities known to any other biological agents.
So Stanford University biologist Ivan Zheludev and colleagues argue their strange discovery may not be viruses at all, but instead an entirely new group of entities that may help bridge the ancient gap between the simplest genetic molecules and more complex viruses.
"Obelisks comprise a class of diverse RNAs that have colonized, and gone unnoticed in, human, and global microbiomes," the researchers write in a preprint paper.
