Organic matter – things like plants, meat, insects, and bacteria – are bound to be the nice meal of another creature that has slowly evolved through time to develop an appetite for the aformentioned.
However, for the longest time, viruses were never on the menu – until researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln discovered an organism that did eat them. It's a freshwater microbe (or ciliate) called Halteria.
“They’re made up of really good stuff: Nucleic acids, a lot of nitrogen, and phosphorous,” said researcher John Delong of viruses. “Everything should want to eat them. So many things will eat anything they can get ahold of. Surely something would have learned how to eat these really good raw materials.”
What's for dinner?
According to the study – published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – researchers posited that certain microbes could have already evolved into eating viruses, considering the fact that they're made up of "really good stuff", as DeLong previously mentioned.
A chlorovirus sample. IMAGE: Kit Lee & Angie Fox / University of Nebraska-Lincoln
In testing this theory, DeLong and his team isolated different microbes from a sample of fresh pond water and then introduced them into a batch of chlorovirus – a freshwater-borne virus that feeds on algae.
Over a period of a few days, the team set out to track the population growth (if any) of both the chloroviruses and microbes to see if the former was being eaten by the latter. Lo and behold, it worked!
In the water samples that contained only Halteria and chloroviruses, the Halteria populations grew by roughly 15 times in just two days. Conversely, chlorovirus levels dropped 100-fold. But just to make sure the Halteria microbes were actually feasting on the chlorovirus population, the team tagged chlorovirus DNA with fluorescent dye.
Halteria. IMAGE: Damián H. Zanette
Observations clearly showed that the Halteria cells were glowing, since they had consumed chlorovirus. The control sample also backs this up – without the virus in sight, Halteria populations did not grow at all.
In addition to familiar terms like herbivores and carnivores, we can now call the Halteria cell a 'virovore' – an organism that preys on viruses. It's still early days, though, which means there could possibly be many more virovores out there, waiting to be discovered.
Read the peer-reviewed study here.
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