Bizarre, never-before-seen viruses discovered thriving throughout the world’s oceans

Scientists have found never-before-seen viruses that thrive in sunlit oceans from pole to pole and infect plankton. They dubbed the newfound microbes “mirusviruses” — “mirus” which means “unusual” in Latin.

The researchers concluded that mirusviruses belong to a big group of viruses known as Duplodnaviria, which incorporates the herpesviruses that infect animals and people, primarily based on shared genes that encode the shell, or “particle” enclosing their DNA. However the unusual, newfound viruses additionally share a staggering variety of genes with a bunch of large viruses, known as Varidnaviria.