Yaravirus: A novel 80-nm virus infecting <i>Acanthamoeba castellanii</i>
Paulo Victor de Miranda Boratto, Graziele Pereira Oliveira, Talita Bastos Machado, Ana Cláudia S. P. Andrade, Jean‐Pierre Baudoin, Thomas Klose, Frederik Schulz, Saı̈d Azza, Philippe Decloquement, Éric Chabrière, Philippe Colson, Anthony Levasseur, Bernard La Scola, Jônatas Santos Abrahão
Abstract
Significance Most of the known viruses of amoeba have been seen to share some features that eventually prompted authors to classify them into common evolutionary groups. Here we describe Yaravirus, an entity that could represent either the first isolated virus of Acanthamoeba spp. out of the group of NCLDVs or, in an alternative scenario, a distant and extremely reduced virus of this group. Contrary to what is observed in other isolated viruses of amoeba, Yaravirus does not have a large/giant particle or a complex genome, but at the same time carries a number of previously undescribed genes, including one encoding a divergent major capsid protein. Metagenomic approaches also testified for the rarity of Yaravirus in the environment.