{"id":102314,"date":"2020-02-13T12:09:30","date_gmt":"2020-02-13T20:09:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/huge-bacteria-eating-viruses-close-gap-between-life-and-non-life"},"modified":"2020-02-13T12:09:30","modified_gmt":"2020-02-13T20:09:30","slug":"huge-bacteria-eating-viruses-close-gap-between-life-and-non-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/huge-bacteria-eating-viruses-close-gap-between-life-and-non-life","title":{"rendered":"Huge bacteria-eating viruses close gap between life and non-life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/huge-bacteria-eating-viruses-close-gap-between-life-and-non-life3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Scientists have discovered hundreds of unusually large, bacteria-killing viruses with capabilities normally associated with living organisms, blurring the line between living microbes and viral machines.<\/p>\n<p>These phages\u2014short for bacteriophages, so-called because they \u201ceat\u201d bacteria\u2014are of a size and complexity considered typical of life, carry numerous genes normally found in bacteria and use these genes against their bacterial hosts.<\/p>\n<p>University of California, Berkeley, researchers and their collaborators found these huge phages by scouring a large database of DNA that they generated from nearly 30 different Earth environments, ranging from the guts of premature infants and pregnant women to a Tibetan hot spring, a South African bioreactor, hospital rooms, oceans, lakes and deep underground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists have discovered hundreds of unusually large, bacteria-killing viruses with capabilities normally associated with living organisms, blurring the line between living microbes and viral machines. These phages\u2014short for bacteriophages, so-called because they \u201ceat\u201d bacteria\u2014are of a size and complexity considered typical of life, carry numerous genes normally found in bacteria and use these genes against [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":535,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/535"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}