Mimivirus - Implications For Defining "life"

Implications For Defining "life"

Mimivirus possesses many characteristics which place it at the boundary of living and non-living. It is as large as several bacterial species, such as Rickettsia conorii and Tropheryma whipplei, possesses a genome of comparable size to several bacteria, including those above, and codes for products previously not thought to be encoded by viruses. In addition, mimivirus possesses genes coding for nucleotide and amino acid synthesis, which even some small obligate intracellular bacteria lack. This means that unlike these bacteria, mimivirus is not dependent on the host cell genome for coding the metabolic pathways for these products. They do however, lack genes for ribosomal proteins, making mimivirus dependent on a host cell for protein translation and energy metabolism.

Because its lineage is very old and could have emerged prior to cellular organisms, Mimivirus has added to the debate over the origins of life. Some genes unique to Mimivirus, including those coding for the capsid, have been conserved in a variety of viruses which infect organisms from all domains. This has been used to suggest that Mimivirus is related to a type of DNA virus that emerged before cellular organisms and played a key role in the development of all life on Earth. An alternative hypothesis is that there were three distinct types of DNA viruses that were involved in generating the three known domains of life - eukarya, archaea and bacteria.

Nevertheless, mimivirus does not exhibit the following characteristics, all of which are part of many conventional definitions of life: homeostasis, response to stimuli, growth in the normal sense of the term (instead replicating via self-assembly of individual components) or undergoing cellular division.