On the coast of Las Cruces, in Chile, scientists have found the largest virus discovered so far . It is called Megavirus chilensis and measures around 0.7 microns in diameter, which means that it is 10 to 20 times larger than the average virus, and even larger than some bacteria. According to Jean-Michel Claverie, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a co-author of the work, the virus does not appear to have the ability to infect humans.
The Megavirus thus snatches the world record from the Mimivirus , which was found in a water cooling tower in the United Kingdom in 1992. Like the Mimivirus , the new giant virus has threadlike structures on the outside of its shell or capsid, which they probably attract unsuspecting amoebae that hunt down bacteria to feed on.
Viruses differ from bacteria in that they are normally much smaller and do not reproduce on their own, but instead need to infect another organism in order to replicate . The megavirus finding supports the hypothesis that giant viruses evolved from cells that became simpler.
