Tailed bacteriophages with genomes larger than 200 kbp are classified as Jumbo phages,
and are rarely isolated by conventional methods. These phages are designated “jumbo” …

Viruses are ubiquitous. They infect almost every species and are probably the most
abundant biological entities on the planet, yet they are excluded from the Tree of Life (ToL) …

Endogenous viral elements (EVEs)—viruses that have integrated their genomes into those
of their hosts—are prevalent in eukaryotes and have an important role in genome evolution …

Giant and large eukaryotic double-stranded DNA viruses from the Nucleo-Cytoplasmic
Large DNA Virus (NCLDV) assemblage represent a remarkably diverse and potentially …

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has piqued public interest in the properties, evolution,
and emergence of viruses. Here, we discuss how these basic questions have surprisingly …

The phylum Nucleocytoviricota includes the largest and most complex viruses known. These
“giant viruses” have a long evolutionary history that dates back to the early diversification of …

Abstract Fifty years ago, Lynn Margulis, inspiring in early twentieth-century ideas that put
forward a symbiotic origin for some eukaryotic organelles, proposed a unified theory for the …

The accidental discovery of the giant virus of amoeba—Acanthamoeba polyphaga mimivirus
(APMV; more commonly known as mimivirus)—in 2003 changed the field of virology …

Asgard archaea are globally distributed prokaryotic microorganisms related to eukaryotes;
however, viruses that infect these organisms have not been described. Here, using …

With DNA genomes reaching 2.5 Mb packed in particles of bacterium-like shape and
dimension, the first two Acanthamoeba-infecting pandoraviruses remained up to now the …