Dubbed "wildly weird" by the team of Stanford University scientists who discovered them, these microbes now have a name: obelisks. And we...don't really know their end goal.
"It's insane," said Mark Peifer, PhD, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as noted in Science. "The more we look, the more crazy things we see."
Obelisks, so named for their rod-shaped structures, are even smaller than viruses, but they can still transmit instructions to cells. What they're saying, however, we just don't know.
The preprint paper from Stanford announcing the discovery calls obelisks "viroid-like"-a viroid is one step down from a virus. And they're even more simplistic-scraps of genetic RNA that cannot make proteins but can regroup, and have been known to plague flowering plants.
This story is from the July - August 2024 edition of Popular Mechanics US.
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This story is from the July - August 2024 edition of Popular Mechanics US.
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