Analysis of sequence databases reveals novel circular RNA genomes belonging to “obelisks”
As they collect and analyze massive amounts of genetic sequences from plants, animals, and microbes, biologists keep encountering surprises, including some that may challenge the very definition of life. The latest, reported this week in a preprint, is a new kind of viruslike entity that inhabits bacteria dwelling in the human mouth and gut.
It’s not yet known whether obelisks affect human health, says Matthew Sullivan, an integrative biologist at Ohio State University, but they could alter the genetic activity of their bacterial hosts, which in turn could affect human genes. Scientists still debate whether viruses are alive—they can’t replicate independent of a host cell’s molecules—but there are even simpler “creatures.” In the early 20th century, plant pathologists came across viroids, basically an infectious loop of RNA without the typical protein shell of viruses. Viroid genomes don’t encode any proteins at all, it seems.
The Stanford search yielded nearly 30,000 predicted RNA circles, each consisting of about 1000 bases and likely representing a distinct obelisk. They were unlikely to be bona fide viruses, the team concluded, because RNA viruses typically have many more bases. But some of the obelisk sequences encoded proteins involved in RNA replication, making them more complex than standard viroids. Like viroids, however, obelisks don’t seem to encode proteins that make up a shell.
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