Giant virus discovery expands knowledge of viral latency

I'm holding here a flask of the model green algae, clamydomonus rhinedii. This is a green algae that's been a model system for studying things like photosynthesis and motility and algae for many decades. A few years ago, we noticed that the genome of one of these isolates had a giant virus integrated into the genome of the algae. We wanted to see if the giant virus could reactivate and actually form variance if it was actually integrating into the genome of its host, similar to other latent viruses like HIV or herpes viruses or things like that. Most giant viruses, when they infect the host, they wipe out all of the cells. They're highly virulence. What's remarkable about this giant virus we found here is that the cultures of the algae seem to be growing just fine. Only a small fraction of the cells here actually have a viral infection. This opens a very broad avenue of research because these type of probably strategy of infection within the giant viruses are not very well known. We know now that viruses can actually stay dormant for a period of time, and then after certain triggers or cues they can sense, they might be able to carry on with further infection. We're sitting, I think, on a lot of data right now that needs to be further explored. We definitely want to be able to understand better what are the steps happening within these infection cycles. We can learn a lot from this virus. It's a completely new virus host interaction. Whenever these things are discovered, they always lead to lots of really interesting discoveries.