Everything You Need To Know About The New Virus In Brazil

The coronavirus has shown how little the world knows about viruses. While experts are still trying to figure out the new virus deeply and come up with a solution, yet another type of virus has emerged from Brazil.

The new virus found in Brazil contains 90% unidentifiable genes and this information is quite alarming since it indicates that there might be more such viruses in the future to deal with.

Since there isn’t any specific methodology to name viruses, the new one gets its name from ‘Yara’ – a popular water goddess found in Brazilian mythologies. They discovered the virus in an artificial lagoon named Pampulha which is located in the city of Belo Horizonte.

“Most of the known viruses of amoeba have been seen to share many features that eventually prompted authors to classify them into common evolutionary groups. Contrary to what is observed in other isolated viruses of amoeba, Yaravirus is not represented by a large/giant particle and a complex genome, but at the same time carries an important number of previously undescribed genes, including one encoding a novel major capsid protein. Metagenomic approaches also testified for the rarity of Yaravirus in the environment,” mentioned the authors.

Here’s everything we know about the Yaravirus so far:

• The new Brazilian ‘Yaravirus brasiliensis’ was discovered by a couple of senior virologists- Bernard La Scola from Aix-Marseille University in France, and Jonatas S. Abrahao from Brazil’s Federal University of Minas Gerais.
• About 2 years ago, the above-mentioned scientists discovered a Giant virus named Tupan.
• The virus possesses 6 genes that exhibit similarity to about 8.500 metagenomes.
• Proteomics revealed that the Yaravirus particles contain 26 viral proteins.
• It is an amoebal virus and this is the only fact scientists are sure of.
• Yara is composed of about 80 nm size particles and cannot be considered as a Giant virus.
• It might be an evolution of a smaller virus having components of a Giant virus.
• It does pose a huge threat but the good thing is that scientists have identified it before it has infected people.