Ushikuvirus: Newly discovered virus may offer clues to the origin of eukaryotes

My brief, illustrated history of Microbial Mats (p.10) to Multicellular Eukaryotes (p.13) may be of interest:

https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf

Incidentally, anyone know what is going on with this image - “Cryo-EM map of a center slice of the ushikuvirus particle”: https://journals.asm.org/cms/10.1128/jvi.01206-25/asset/1357...

It’s one quarter of an image flipped horizontally and then vertically, you can see the patterns.

It’s a bit odd to do that? Shouldn’t it just be the original EM image?

I remember someone talking about "last universal common ancestor" at some point, the single "origin of the cells" or something. Is that the same as the "archaeal ancestor" they're referring to here? And is the "archaeal ancestor" the same as the "Primitive archael cell" mentioned in the last image in the article? (https://www.tus.ac.jp/en/mediarelations/20251219_9539_03.png)

Lends a whole other colour to that scene from The Matrix... Agent Smith monologuing at Morpheus bound to the chair.

> Agent Smith: I’d like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.

ref: "Smith Interrogates Morpheus Transcript" https://scottmanning.com/content/smith-interrogates-morpheus...

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Edit: Maybe it takes virulence to colonise the galaxy. A sobering thought.

Interesting, hope that these discoveries can be used to fight those amoeba's which cause infections as well!

We have discovered a new giant DNA virus that may help us fight life-threatening amoebae was good enough.

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