Scientists trawling through an immense volume of seawater believe they have found the evolutionary origin of the herpes virus. 9News
The microbes have been named "Mirusviruses" - mirus being the Latin word for "strange".Post-sex pill seen as new tool to fight rising STD rates
Mirusviruses are a bizarre hybrid of two different lineages, but belong to the same group of viruses as the type of herpes that infect humans and other animals. "This means that there is a shared evolutionary history between herpes, that infect only animals, and the mirusviruses that are everywhere in the ocean, where they infect unicellular organisms," French National Centre for Scientific Research's Tom Delmont toldPlankton are tiny water creatures defined by their incapacity to swim against currents. Instead they spend their lives drifting through the water.
But while the mirusviruses pose a serious threat to the health of individual plankters, they are thought to be good for the overall ecosystem.The findings were first published in
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